


Drowning Lessons

by twistedservice



Series: The Foregone [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: (definitely), (mostly), Action/Adventure, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Character Death, Comfort/Angst, Everyone Has Issues, Everyone Is Alive, F/F, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Major Character Injury, Minor Character Death, Modern Era, Multi, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Official Prequel, Supernatural Elements, Unofficial Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 68,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22926961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedservice/pseuds/twistedservice
Summary: Remember this: you are either human, or you are not. There is no in-between.Remember this, moreso: no matter what you are, you were always meant to fall.
Series: The Foregone [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1647778
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. The Fated

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to uh... part two? The prequel? Both is good.
> 
> This is yet another AU of one of my own stories (ridiculous, I'm aware). Said story is called Invictus and can be found on my fanfiction profile. Being a Hunger Games fic, it's easy to explain the strange names, but any other strangeness is all my own doing. It's just about finishing up and is not whatsoever required to be read to read this; it's mostly just an ode to any of my readers. 
> 
> I've written another one of these, an AU based on a story I finished in late 2018. The AU-version just finished uploading here. Once again, you don't have to read that to read this one; you can, if you want, but it's not necessary reading.
> 
> This is just the prologue, so to speak. I have no set updating schedule, but the next chapter won't be up until I'm finished through Invictus itself in just a few short weeks. After that, we'll see. There are many, many fics planned, and I'm not keen on leaving big spaces of time between updates, so we'll see how fast I can crank it out.
> 
> To anyone who reads - thank you in advance. It means a lot.
> 
> Enjoy.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.   
—Don DeLillo, White Noise

Sometimes it was hard to breathe, knowing how small my world could be. Maybe in San Francisco it wouldn’t feel like the universe was conspiring to keep me in a bubble.   
—Heather Demetrios, I’ll Meet You There

California is where you get to start over.   
—Tracy Chevalier, At the Edge of the Orchard

* * *

It was always a different story, entirely dependent on who you asked to tell it.

That’s because the people telling it were always different, too. They were even more individualized when they weren’t really  _ people,  _ too. In that case it was even more difficult and troubling to fit them into something that made any amount of sense.

The worst part was always that you wouldn’t hear the whole thing. It would be bits and pieces gained here and there, different voices in different times, and never enough to be complete.

Everything finished, eventually. That didn’t mean the finish was going to be good. That didn’t mean it was going to be the ending they wanted. That wasn’t how it worked, in this world or any other.

It didn’t matter the universe. Everyone got what they deserved.

And they were going to get theirs.

—

—

—

Identity was a thing Caiman had never had a proper grasp on.

She was an in-between - the possibility of something almost human that could so easily slip back into the depths, literally or not. It was often literally, in her case.

It had been years of not knowing who or what she was that had driven her out into civilization in the first place; she had never seen a high rise, a shopfront, a street full of busybodies, only thinking of their destination and not the journey. For her it had  _ always  _ been the journey.

She liked where she was. She liked knowing people even if she didn't always know herself.

Sometimes she wondered about the depths, about the murkiness she had left behind. People called her kind monsters, but she didn't feel as if that word was proper at all.

It felt like she was still lost in it, sometimes. She could be called a monster and fight it, but she couldn't win every battle.

She could try. She  _ had _ tried.

But she couldn't fight a war if she was too busy fighting herself.

—

Nic was normal, you see.

It had never bothered him; even when being inserted into the most supernatural of circumstances, he found that being average had its advantages. It wasn't something that weighed on him. Being normal, just like being inhuman, wasn't inherently a bad thing.

So he was normal.

Until it happened, anyway.

—

It was an accident. That’s what Trojan remains true about.

Everything that happened with him was an  _ accident.  _ That rich bastard in the financial district, outside of the Hyatt? Accident. The woman who had lingered too long in the lot outside the Presidio golf course after dark? Accident. One lone, grizzled fisherman down on Pier 33, who should have just kept his eyes on the water and left them there?

Alright, maybe that one hadn’t been an accident. But it hadn’t been Trojan’s fault either.

That was the trouble with having a side of yourself that was beyond any control. It was like letting something else take the reins, something that saw for him and moved for him and just  _ did it _ . In those moments, it took the smallest flicker of desire for something to happen and turned it into an inferno.

He’d be lying if that side didn’t enthrall him, keep him awake at night even when it was dormant. Sometimes it was all he could think about

He didn’t know who was more terrified when it happened - whoever happened to be around him at the moment, or whatever part of him still existed on the inside, watching it happen as if trapped behind glass.

Well, he had an answer now. For the first time, he had seen eyes that he knew, when it happened, and they had been horrified.

More horrified than he had been, anyway.

—

Kidava had come from a line. Key word being  _ had. _

Things like her didn't just exist anymore. It was in the blood, a kind that hardly stuck around. They were a dying breed.

The sky was full of enough things. It didn't need her, too.

There was a reason she was halfway across the country from where she had been born. When people came for them, and they always did, you fled as fast as the wind would carry you. That was what she had been taught. That was what her grandmother had been reiterating to her for the hundredth time when she had been slaughtered like the rest of them too.

When you were her, when you were brought up on tales of people going missing and your kind being the cause, the word evil was as comfortable as any other.

They were going to call her evil, anyway.

There was certainly no harm in proving them right.

—

He had been living in golden years, things tinged only the happiest of colors, so it only made sense that Mel eventually gave it all up.

Or it didn’t make sense at all, but he didn’t care.

He was meant to do good and to be good, living on dreams and most importantly the happiest of them. So long as he could live in a universe that seemed ideal nothing else seemed to matter. That is until he met the opposite, however. He wasn’t even sure the opposite existed until he was looking it in the face.

It was more beautiful than he had expected it to be.

And it was worth giving up the dreams for, too.

—

Faye was born on an abnormally hot August day, a single minute after midnight.

It was the minute that mattered. All across the city were three others in three separate seasons, born a minute after midnight. Two before, and one after. Perfectly aligned.

That was the thing, about elementals. It was always appropriately four. A grouping didn’t work proper if there was one more, one less. It was four, or nothing.

If she was being honest, she would have prefered nothing.

The other three? They were just dragging her down.

—

They had adapted as the centuries passed, but Myra would always be able to hear the whistling swing of a sword before it cut through flesh and sinew and bone, the sick thud of a head hitting the ground, unattached from the neck.

Whilst everything else had shifted and changed to fit with the time, that hadn’t. She’d be able to hear that sound forever, picture it in the moment it had happened.

The old her, anyway. It was odd to be a completely separate person than that of the version that existed in her head, but it was the version that had to exist. They were down to two from three, after all, and they survived centuries more because they had adapted.

It meant giving up things that had been her birthright and forming instead into something that society would enjoy; gone were the wings and the scales, the fangs and the claws.

Myra was a person who owned a building, and a cafe, and tattooed herself to accommodate for the loss of everything else. She had one sibling, not two. Her past was a story and untrue. That was what people believed - what she  _ allowed  _ them to believe.

If they dared to look her in the eye long enough, they would discover a different story altogether.

—

People had called her many names over the century, namely Vivian, but she found that Noelani suited her better than the rest.

She couldn't blame anyone for what they liked - common folk enjoyed the simplicity of things and the ease that came along with them.

Noelani was complicated. Different. Unexpected.

It was a name to match the twenty-first century version of herself, the blue-green hair that she had adopted and the little brother to go along with it. Neither had been things she expected or even thought she wanted, but she has just been alone for so long…

Her issue was being alone. She had always been surrounded by so many people but had never been one herself - she was a healer, a tale, a sword-wielder. People wrote stories about what she did but never about  _ her. _

Noelani was different to everyone else, but to her it was just normal. It was a name and a life where she wasn't alone.

Some of the stories were true and some not, but this one?

This one was real.

—

His brother died when he was seven. That made it a nine year anniversary, nine long years in which Damas had been given to get over it.

There was no getting over something when you maintained that you were the direct cause of it, however. His powers emerging meant his brother dying. It wasn’t a complicated equation. Everyone knew it and likewise refused to say it.

He was born. Seven years later, his brother died.

And if he hadn’t been, the world would have been better off for it, his brother included.

—

Sometimes Topher thought about what it would be like to slip in the ocean and disappear.

He’s not even sure he  _ could.  _ It’s theoretically possible, with what he can do, but then what? He just lives down there, never comes out? Someone would miss him. Hopefully, anyway.

It’s hard living a life he doesn’t think he was meant to. He can charade around all he likes and try to get better but he’s never good  _ enough  _ no matter the effort he puts in, hours and days and even years since he gained this new life in the first place.

He’s not ungrateful for it. It’s even good, most of the time. It was certainly good in the beginning.

That doesn’t stop the ocean from looking tempting every once in a while.

—

She was raised on nightmares, on becoming them and being one.

Meris didn’t have a single good dream for over two hundred and fifty years.

—

Verity thinks her parents knew, somehow.

That’s not possible, not really… but maybe? The both of them had been born and raised in Abilene, Texas, a placed that sounded far more interesting than it actually was and also resided right at the fringes of Tornado alley, and had moved six months before she was born.

Having that much power wouldn’t have been good for her. Sure, things still happened in California, but nothing of that magnitude, and not so safely isolated in the middle of a city.

So maybe they knew. They probably didn’t.

It didn’t stop her from feeling she had been robbed of something bigger.

—

Jupiter lived twenty-one years of life wondering who had cursed them; surely someone had to have, for them to end up with only one fully intact limb, insides full of cancer that came and went at the same speed the tide did.

They couldn’t have been born like that. No one was that unlucky.

Unluckiness, these days, felt like a disease too.

It all came down to a knock on the door, a face Jupiter felt like they should know but couldn’t recognize. A feeling that something bigger had always been afoot, when he looked them in the eyes and they dared to look back.

That day, the tide flowed out, and it stayed.

—

Mal wasn’t chosen at birth, like the others. He wasn’t meant to leave.

They didn’t so much let him go as they were forced to. He didn’t think he was a bad person, so when they had done the swap, something in him had felt off. For days he had wondered why one of their own had been given up, a human put in their place.

The one they had sent off wasn’t right, is what he was told. Something about sickness and deformity. I would be better off with a human family, they insisted.

He had even believed it for a time. That didn’t stop him from wondering.

Over twenty years was a long time to wonder, for most people, but not for him. He had hundreds of years ahead of him; it only took twenty for him to leave.

The court tried to get him back. They tried more than once, in fact. Eventually they sent him off, with no blessings and with no well wishes. That wasn’t how they did things. He went with a bow and empty promises of diplomacy like so many of their emissaries did.

It wasn’t even that far to San Francisco. Mal had lived his whole life in the woods, not knowing better.

Still, he found the city. And with it, he found the changeling.

—

They still had a snake in the apartment, safely contained. That had been Jahaira’s one condition when they ended up in California.

The last place they lived, however long ago that had even been, had been run by a landlord who was completely petrified of them. Something about an incident from her childhood, was what she always said. Not that Jahaira cared, really. She had been vetoed in that regard - something about being good tenants and the legality of the situation and the inevitably of being kicked off onto the street.

The landlord already had two living under her roof. It was too bad she didn’t know that.

That may have been her other Californian-related condition - they would buy a building, this time. No one could tell them not to bring a snake into it that way.

The snake to this day still didn’t have a name. It didn’t feel fair to pin it down to one single thing, when she herself had been a hundred different versions and names and appearances and efforts to assimilate. Because the job had been left to her, it remained nameless.

Unlike very few people around her, Jahaira liked the world they had now. Sure there was that odd, misplaced phobia of snakes that she could never understand, but everything else was good. She liked being able to own things. She liked having a camera. She liked not living in fear of someone cutting her head off and mounting it on a shield.

Really, what was there to complain about?

—

Arwen had been gifted with a voice.

It was all terribly tragic, really. Her mother had grown up with the ideology that she was meant for stardom with the voice she had on her. Murder was the more apt option, a better fitting destiny. Her mother hadn’t been so keen on that, but her mother spared no love for the ocean, either, so it was easy enough to stop it, for a while.

It all came down to the fact that changing in the water was as easy as breathing, once she got the hang of it, and if she was quick enough no one ever noticed she was gone. Everything all boiled down to that night, Valentine’s Day, as hilarious as that was in hindsight. To this day Winnie didn’t know if the poor fucker had drowned or if he had frozen to death, first. The water at that time of year was a balmy fifty-five degrees, after all.

_ He  _ had followed her out, all without her even noticing. All she had done is watch his lifeless corpse float away and think  _ that sure is unfortunate, isn’t it _ ? Days later she came to the conclusion that she might not be what she always thought. Mermaids weren’t inherently bad, per say. They didn’t lure people out into the water to die, unintentionally or not.

She had been singing to herself, almost absentmindedly, when she had noticed his body drifting along in the current.

So she wasn’t a mermaid. That was a certainty.

No, she was worse.

—

Jay lost every single thing he ever had. Every family memento, his parents, his brother. The home in which he had grown up. All of that had went up in flames and ash, all in one brilliant flare of light.

It took him awhile to process the fact that he had  _ nothing.  _ It took even longer for him to realize that, after the fact, he was beginning to forget what he had originally looked like.

He could look in the mirror all he liked - with no photos of what he looked like left to the existing world, if his eyes were a shade lighter or darker than the recreation he could come up with it didn’t matter, because no one knew anyway.

See, Jay  _ thought  _ it was close. He thought he looked like what he used to.

There was just no way of knowing if it was the truth.

—

Sabre has been to more memorials than there are years he has been alive.

He knew about his parents days before they each happened. Easy, quiet deaths, his mother even in her sleep, but terrible nonetheless.

It wasn’t everyone. More often than not it was people he knew, even if they had only spoken a few words in passing. A shopkeeper in a neighboring town. A peer from the earliest days of school. Two days after he landed in the States for good it was the flight attendant who had greeted him first onboard. Sabre could have looked up an obituary, but never did. He didn’t need the confirmation for someone being struck and killed by a vehicle when he had already seen it in his own mind.

That was why, in the end, he had chosen California and it’s unfailing ability to harbor the biggest supernatural population in the country. If he surrounded himself with things that couldn’t die then the visions would quiet.

And it worked for a while, too. What he didn’t realize at the time is that a plane ride across the world is no different than wings, and neither would carry him far enough away.

Everything dies, in the end.

Eventually even the things around him still.

—

There were a lot of things on each emissaries plate, Percy knew. He had taken the job willingly. The courts were fragile; they were keeping them together. You stayed on your side, but you kept it together.

Only two things remained true, the whole while: you held no love for the other side, and you held no love for any of the humans in your path, either.

Percy just had the misfortune to do both.

—

Dying was easy, almost; in his experience, living was the hard part.

—

She may have killed dozens of people once upon a time, but at least they were all men.

—

What did it matter, when no one knew?

—

It always came down to the fire and the fall and what was worse between the two, but he had an answer that most people wouldn't have assumed: the water.

—

She wasn’t part of the current line, the chapter, the moment - when the story wasn't there yet, it was best not to ask prematurely.


	2. The Sun and the Storm

**TAKE ONE.**

The population of San Francisco is 867,345 the day the sky falls for the first time.

Sixty-one percent is human - fully human, anyway. A number totaling, on most days, up to approximately 529,080. You see numbers are tricky things, made even trickier by that of the supernatural. Most creatures don’t partake in the problems that numbers create, let alone bring them to life.

The date is June 13th, 2017. The population is 867,345.

And then, suddenly, there are fifty-seven more. Fifty-seven things that came from the sky, fifty-seven great unknowns, possibilities, fears.

It’s cataclysmic. Earth-shattering. A sudden bit of knowledge everyone always said they wanted but weren’t prepared to have.

It was world-ending, and no one was any the wiser, yet.

 **Monday, May 15th.  
** **Twenty-nine days before.**

He remembers very little. Falling. Burning. The water, two inches before. It always looked so beautiful in those last few seconds, but it was an easy thing to forget about once you were drowning.

The worst part _was_ the remembering, and it always happened when he was falling. It was the feeling of deja vu finally settling, the knowledge that this had happened before and was going to happen over and over and _over_ again because that was how the cycle would work. He would forget again. He would fall again.

Except this time, he wakes up.

There’s no re-birth, no extended period of darkness. There’s just the sun on his face and the sand underneath his back, the water still lapping at his feet. He’s still faintly damp from being under. But he’s not dead, and he should be. Dead and on the fast track to another life, a restart that will end the same way. Because that’s how it _works_.

Piece by piece everything is starting to come back, and not just the moments before he fell. All of it is coming back, the dozens of lives he’s lived over and over and the ending that befell him in every single one. The details are fuzzy, but the rest?

He’s supposed to die at twenty, every single time. Is it twenty? What day is it, exactly? Is something specifically fated?

And most importantly, why is he not dead?

He waits to see if perhaps death is coming after all, but nothing happens. As the seconds pass he only grows more and more aware of his surroundings, of what’s happened to him. He’s on a stretch of deserted beach, hidden by rocks. The bridge is far, but not too far. He remembers the sky, being too high up, the scorch of the sun familiar at his back. Said back is raw and bleeding, stuck to the sand in painful places that are threatening to tear more skin from his spine.

The wings are gone, and he’s alive.

But that’s just the problem with being Icarus, isn’t it?

—

His shirt, as he comes to discover, is half-missing in burnt, ugly patches.

That’s why he’s getting the looks, a slow realization that finally comes to fruition when he struggles his way off the beach and through the rocks until he hits somewhat of a path, cutting through the grass. It winds all the way back up the hill to a parking lot no more than a block away, teeming with people that are starting to make their way down to the bay.

Icarus finally has to admit that this isn’t an ideal situation once he makes it more than fifteen or twenty paces without choking up water.

These people are looking at him like they know what’s happened, or rather, what _hasn’t_. They couldn’t even hazard a guess in actuality.

He shouldn’t be fucking alive.

And there’s nothing, now. The wings are gone. He can’t recall the details of before. His wallet and phone are nowhere to be found. The fact of the matter is he’s a dead man walking, literally and figuratively, and there’s nowhere to go. He certainly can’t go up. There’s no manual for what comes next after this because this has never happened before, and he can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t supposed to this time, either.

He has no name, no explanation except for _Icarus_ , that’s who you are, all you are. Icarus was never meant to survive.

So what does he do, now?

Avoid the two squadron cars on the next block, first of all. If pedestrians are giving him looks they’ll approach and he’s not sure he has the explanation worked out for that. Perhaps in a bit. The cops could help, maybe. Maybe for once they could do some good instead of more harm. First he needs a shirt, though, and a mirror. He needs to see what happened.

There’s trouble with that in the city. San Francisco isn’t exactly crawling with people looking to lend a helping hand, and most of the restaurants with a publicly accessible bathroom won’t let him anyway looking like this. His best bet is heading to a park, or heading deeper into the streets hoping he finds someone who will take pity on him. Every step is painful; blood drips down his back and burnt skin flakes away whenever he tries to stop it. He can’t even touch his skin without a scream threatening to escape his throat.

It’s getting worse with every passing second that the sun beats down over him. The water wasn’t enough to douse the fire coursing across his back - it only intensifies every time he adds a step to his journey.

It feels like he needs water. There isn’t any in sight.

Icarus ends up stumbling into an alley, half-blind with pain. His pants had looked reasonably intact until this moment, and now they’re spotted through with blood that’s dripped down from higher places.

He’s done for. Even though he didn’t die outright, succumb to the water like he usually does, all that matters now is that he’s got no way out of his current situation. He can remember some things, but not enough. Nothing that would save him, truly - who he could go to for help, the place he called home, anything that would be relatively safe.

He has nothing except his own blood, and he’s even losing that.

“Christ, what the fuck happened to you?”

He flinches, ramming his shoulder into the nearest brick wall, and bites down so hard on his own lip to keep from crying out that it eventually bleeds too. He reaches a hand out for the dumpster in front of him; standing on the other side of it, and it’s half-open lid, is a girl who looks as if he just pissed in her non-existent cereal.

She also looks, conveniently, like she could finish him off in about two seconds flat. He might just ask her to.

“Let me guess,” she says slowly. “Demon?”

It takes him a few tries even for a single word. “What?” he croaks finally, unable to think of anything better.

“I’ve just never seen something _other_ than a demon look so crispy.”

“Crispy,” he echoes. Whether it’s his brain fading or his ability to understand what this conversation is, there’s no telling. Why is he even trying in this state?

“Like a chicken,” she explains. “Please don’t drop dead in the alley behind my place. I’ve had enough people do that in the past, and it’s always horrifically awkward.”

Icarus looks down between his feet, as if expecting a corpse or maybe a pool of blood, but finds only his own droplets, and then gets so suddenly dizzy he nearly faceplants into the side of the dumpster. The girl never moves. If he falls he gets the feeling she’s not going to stop him.

Nothing ever has.

“Have you considered going to a hospital?” she asks, out of the blue. “It might help.”

Would it, though? Icarus doesn’t know what his back looks like, and isn’t sure he wants to. There’s no telling what any hospital staff are going to make of it. They’ll ask questions he doesn’t have answers to, and they’ll make it hurt worse before they fix it.

“I can call you a cab,” she offers. “There’s no way in hell you’re getting in my car like that.”

He stares at her. She stares back. It would be much, much easier to let her kill him.

Does Icarus want to die?

She sighs, and re-opens the door next to her with an overly dramatic gesture only befitting of him. “I’ll call you a cab. Let’s go.”

“I don’t,” he starts, and then wisely switches routes. He can’t tell her he has no money. Things might head a different direction. “Do you live here?”

She snorts. “ _Live here_. No. I have some self-respect, thank you for asking.”

But it’s her building, somehow. It’s impossible to tell what it is from this crammed back alley space, but he ducks under her long, tattooed arm into the hallway she’s revealed regardless, because he’s about two seconds from falling over dead, or unconscious, and he’d rather do it inside.

He’s barely able to straighten up, but she eases past him and leads him through the impossible to identify hallway, past a set of restrooms and another door marked ‘employees only’ before she heads through the last bit, a wide archway that leads into the main room.

It’s a cafe, of some sorts. There’s a long counter up against one wall and the rest of the space is filled with mismatched tables and chairs. A few people are scattered about, almost all of which ignore the girl’s arrival in favor of his. He’s no pinnacle for stating the obvious, but he can tell who’s what instantly. The humans look nervous, as if finally realizing they’ve stepped into the wrong establishment. The majority, the ones who look and then go back to the task at hand, are most definitely supernatural.

Which leads him to believe the girl who just led him in here is, too.

Said girl nudges him, sharply. It hurts too bad to put words to. “Over there,” she gestures. “Sit. Do not touch my laptop. Don’t talk to anyone, either. You’re weirding out enough people.”

Sure enough, within the minute, the three people and their owl-eyed expressions crowded around the same table by the door flee, coffees half-finished and forgotten about. By the time he sits down at the table she pointed out, almost hidden away in the corner, two more have gone. Some people here are still not used to it.

He watches her sidle up behind the counter for the phone, all the while avoiding the temptation to drag her laptop at the edge of the table ever closer. The screen is dark, but that wouldn’t stop him.

Apparently all of this hasn’t stopped him from being so nosy.

A set of footsteps come down softly beside him, and then a flashbulb erupts so closely and intensely to his face that he’s nearly rendered blind. The two things are such contrasts that he can barely think straight to compare them at all.

By the time he can see again, there’s another girl leaning over him. She lowers the camera away from her face.

“Who the hell are you?” she asks.

He wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone. That was explicitly expressed.

The girl behind the counter is on the phone, now, but waves wildly in their general direction. “Ignore her! Jahaira, leave him alone.”

Jahaira ignores that, and leans in even closer. “How do you know Myra?”

“I— who?”

She turns away, extending an arm and an even more aggressive finger. “ _Myra_ ,” she repeats, pointing towards the girl behind the counter whose name is apparently Myra.

“I don’t?”

Jahaira looks positively perplexed. “Huh,” she announces, and then quite literally flounces away, as if she’s already tired of him. He doesn’t blame her.

Icarus is tired of himself, too.

He sits there for another thirty seconds or so before Myra hangs up the phone, holding up five fingers in response to his querying look. Five minutes it is, then. Icarus still hasn’t figured out how he’s managing those five minutes, or any of the minutes after it when he’s stuck in a cab he has no money to pay for. There’s already too much to focus on, and he’s largely stuck on the fact that he has no idea how to even survive this.

Right now, a cab is the least of his worries, which are piling up by the minute.

At least, finally, the curious gazes from around the room have petered off, replaced by nothing except the sunlight streaming in through the road-facing windows. There’s the thing that usually kills him and sends him plummeting several hundred feet to his inevitable, watery death. It feels like he constantly lives with water in his lungs.

Only one person properly looks at him again, the singular new arrival between Myra hanging up the phone and what Icarus is sure must be three or four minutes, by now. They give him an unimpressed, unrattled once over and then turn their attention back to Myra, still behind the front counter. She’s watching for the cab, same as him.

That’s not the only thing he’s chosen to focus on, though, as his slightly hazy vision lasers in on the wallet the guy lays at the edge of the counter, until his hand is no longer wrapped around it.

To clarify, he’s not a thief. Icarus has never stolen something in his life, not that he remembers any of the details of the past… several thousand years?

Okay, maybe he has.

Still, is he really considering it? His options are dwindling, as is his time before the cab pulls up alongside the curb. He’s not going to get anywhere unless someone takes him, but a driver isn’t even going to let him get out without paying. It’s not like Icarus can run.

So he’s doing it, apparently.

He gets up. The chair does nothing in the vein of obnoxious squealing as he stumbles to his feet, but both Myra and the guy look at him when he shuffles over, all the while praying he’s not leaving a blood trail behind him.

When he approaches, there's something in Myra's face that he can't read, and it makes him deeply uncomfortable. A sickly feeling travels all the way up from the base of his spine. It feels like he's not meant to look her in the eye, or at least he shouldn't.

“I’m gonna… go,” he informs her, trying to ignore it. “Outside. Thanks for…”

“Yeah, no worries,” Myra interrupts. “Do you need anything else?”

He shakes his head. It’s awful, how close he has to get to do this. At least neither of them are flinching away. 

The guy, however, turns a look on Myra instead. “You need to stop letting people like that in here.”

“I let _you_ in here.”

“That’s because I don’t walk in after I’ve been through a fucking woodchipper.”

“No, you just come in my apartment like that instead.”

He ignores that too. What happened is actually much worse, but neither of them know him, and they likely don’t care either. All he cares about is they’re focused on each other, for a few seconds, and the guy is leaning just enough up against the counter that the side of his arm is blocking the wallet from the other side. It’s _just enough_ that Icarus stretches his fingers over the counter’s lip and snatches the wallet up, without alerting either of them.

And then, in the world’s slowest fashion, he books it.

It’s faster than he’s moved in the past hour, or however long it’s been since he crawled out of the bay, but slow enough that neither pay any mind to him. No one would ever think he had just taken someone’s wallet, practically right in front of them.

The door chimes when he exits. He’s sure one, or both of them, look after him as he goes, but all he has eyes for is the cab pulling up to the curb two vehicles down.

The driver, perhaps, looks the most unbothered out of anyone Icarus has encountered so far. “Hospital?” he guesses. Maybe he just does this a lot. In a city like this, he wouldn’t necessarily be surprised.

“Quickly,” he urges, watching the door. No one’s come out after him, yet. So long as they get away from the curb, Icarus is home free.

Almost.

They pull away. Nothing happens. He can barely focus on the route flashing along the GPS, or the ever-thickening traffic as the driver turns the next corner. Even his hand hurts, as he uncurls his fingers from the death grip he has on the wallet. It’s not his, but it’s currently the only thing he has to his name, and for some reason it makes him feel better, even in his delirious state.

There’s just shy of twenty dollars in fives and ones, but there are two credit cards, and there has to be a combination that works, somehow.

If that’s the only thing that works today, he could be okay.

“You sure going to the hospital in this state is a good idea?” the driver asks. “You know how they feel about things that aren’t human wandering in there.”

“I’m,” he starts, but just about chokes. He is human… right? Just because he’s been half-something else for thousands of years and always lost it doesn’t mean he has the right not to go to the damn hospital.

Besides, the things that made him _not_ human are gone. Does that not count for anything?

“If you can’t confidently answer that, I’d pass,” he continues. “They’ll just send the Collection Agency for you.”

“I haven’t even done anything.”

They look at each other in the rearview mirror. He _hasn’t_ , besides just about plummet to his death and no doubt terrify a very large handful of people. But he didn’t hurt anyone, or kill anyone.

He did nothing bad.

Now he’s panicking, though. The Collection Agency is supposed to round up the bad things that roam the city and make sure they… can’t do the bad things anymore. It doesn’t sound so bad, when you’re the one on the outside of it, but what will they assume when he walks in? That _he_ did something bad?

There’s a reason most people don’t come back after that.

“You sure there’s nowhere else I can take you?” he asks. His first instinct is _back_ ; he doesn’t even know the name of the place, but the driver must. The thought of heading back there might just make him die anyway.

He only has one other, equally terrifying thought. He eases out the last of the cards left in the wallet, a standard California driver’s license.

They’re all horrible ideas.

“2200 Leavenworth,” he manages. “Is that better?”

“Sure,” the driver answers. There’s no way he knows. It could be a house, but in this area, chances are it’s an apartment building. The GPS changes. The route time shortens drastically.

Icarus is relying on the good fortune of someone who’s wallet he just stole. Surely the guy will help him if he agrees to give it back… right?

He looks at the license again. It doesn’t matter, surely. Every option he has right now leads to him being screwed anyway. This could be the one that doesn’t, if someone is looking down on him.

And if not, if Soran Faerber kills him, then he sort of deserved it.

Icarus was already supposed to die today, anyway.

—

The apartment building looks like a beast, about to open it’s maw and eat him.

That may just be how his day is going so far, or it may be realistic. Until he sees how the next while goes, Icarus is trying to keep an open mind.

A few people pass him by on the sidewalk as he lingers. Their gazes, for the most part, are largely curious. Most people seem to be that way innately, as is the human way, until they realize the larger magnitude of the situation. Everyone is curious until they really _look_ , and then they turn tail as if they themselves have been burned, like the water got to them too.

The front entrance doesn't budge, as predictable as that is, so he shuffles around the side of the building. There are several doors leading off from the lot there; the building is clearly sectioned off into several different areas. He has no idea which one to pick, or if there's even a best option. Does he wait in the lot for someone to get back?

It's to the point that he almost leaves, when someone opens the first of the four doors and steps into the lot. They meet eyes. Icarus is struck by the insane feeling that this stranger is about to punch him unprovoked.

He doesn't, but it feels that way.

"Hey," Icarus says after him. "Does Soran Faerber live here?"

"Unfortunately for me," they answer, without missing a beat. He heads to the only car in the lot that looks as if it doesn't belong, an old thing that's so beat to shit he can't even tell what it is. "Why? Do you know him?"

"Yes," he lies. "Which apartment does he live in?"

"If you really know him, why do you not know?" 

They stare at each other some more. He and Myra both have this unique quality that makes them look infuriatingly related. Icarus isn't sure if it's because of the tattoos, or how likely it is they're going to hurt him just based on how he's been looked at.

"344," he replies, finally. "I didn't tell you that."

"Nope," he agrees. The guy gets into the car, nearly hits him when he pulls out of his spot, and then is gone.

344 it is.

It's the same door, the first one. There's a list of apartment numbers but all of the names alongside it are scratched to oblivion and even beyond. Thankfully the elevator is operational, though it's old. Icarus wouldn't make it up the stairs right now, let alone three floors of them.

The floors are surprisingly small - 344 is all the way at the opposite end, towards the front of the building but only one other door leads up to it. There are two on the opposite side of the hallway, spaced evenly in the middle. It's abnormally quiet, as if no one is here at all. Every noise he hears feels like a figment of his imagination.

And so he waits.

There are numerous noises both above and below him, signs of life in the form of faint footsteps and even smaller voices. The ones above him are less frequent, less intrusive. Maybe he’s imagining them, too. All the while the elevator whirs away, but there’s no sign of life approaching where he’s practically sunken into the window frame at the end of the hall; not to this room, and not to either of the others.

The pain is getting lesser. While you might think that’s good, Icarus can’t help but think the opposite. How bad off is his brain, if he’s getting used to it? The blood has stopped freely running down his back but trapped in the hall, with nothing to distract him, he can practically _smell_ the burned flesh, the copper-rich tang of his blood as it bubbled away likewise.

The elevator dings. He twists, and something else in his back tears open, though this time he feels no blood.

Icarus isn’t sure what he’s hoping for; someone else, or exactly who he’s expecting. Anyone at all, so long as their face is synonymous with help.

Certainly not the plainly murderous look he’s on the receiving end of, as Soran steps out of the elevator.

He shoves the wallet as far as he can into the remains of his lone back pocket; the other one is too tattered to hold anything at all, and holds up a hand. “Hear me out?”

“You know, I usually take the stairs, but I thought I saw blood in the elevator, and I had a strange feeling.”

“Was it right?” he asks, and instantly regrets it. Somehow, the murderous look gets worse.

Soran takes one step closer, and then two. He’s still more than far enough away, but there’s nowhere for Icarus to go. Out the window, but he has no way to catch himself. It’s not a very nice reminder.

“Does this look like the hospital to you?”

“You don’t sound very grateful considering I could have taken off with your wallet and never come back,” he says, because he can’t quite swallow it down. He really is going to die before he ever gets any help.

“And you don’t sound very grateful for the fact that I haven’t immediately _killed you_ considering you stole it in the first place.”

He’s even closer now. Icarus hadn’t even really noticed him moving. The window is looking more and more tempting.

“Three seconds,” Soran says. He could reach out and touch him, by this point, if he was keen to lose a hand.

“Until what?”

“Until I break the window, toss you out of it, and then pick my wallet off of your decimated fucking corpse.”

“I hid it,” he lies. He’s backed up as far as he can go. Soran’s either going to do it or he’s going to help him, and there’s no other existing alternative. At least this way Soran can’t tell he’s keeping it in his back pocket.

“Bullshit.”

“If you kill me, you’re never going to find it,” he insists. “I paid the driver and then got rid of it. You can have it back if you help me.”

“Help you with _what_? Do I look like a fucking doctor?”

“I can’t go to the hospital.”

Soran seems to properly absorb what he’s looking at for the first time, as if he hadn’t done it in the cafe upon first seeing him. Icarus still doesn’t know what state he’s in, and doesn’t think there’s a good way to go about it.

“What are you?” Soran asks, eventually.

“None of your fucking business.”

“So you want me to help you, but I can’t know?”

“I’m pretty sure you _need_ to help me, or else you better get started calling the bank. Don’t want to leave those credit cards in my hands, let me tell you.”

“Because that’s what I fucking care about,” Soran mutters under his breath, though Icarus can still hear him. Before he can begin to question it Soran pulls a key out and opens door 344, grabs his arm, and just about shoves him bodily inside the apartment without warning. He almost complains, but the pain is too sudden for him to focus on much else, and instead of following, Soran shuts the door behind him and leaves.

Icarus is suddenly alone in an otherwise empty and unfamiliar apartment, willing the fire to disappear from his back. It feels like it’s reignited.

There’s no telling where’s Soran’s gone, but he must be coming back, and if Icarus had to hazard a guess that time is shorter than even he believes. He takes in as much as he can in the next three seconds - the kitchen, off to his left, and then the living room just beyond that. A hallway leads to three different doors directly in front of him.

All of the windows are to his left, too, appropriately, allowing sun to filter in through the half-drawn curtains and exposing the rusted balcony and the even more precarious fire escape.

He could take off. Make it to the ground.

First things first - he dives for the couch and nearly collapses into it. His knees hit the ground and ache as he fumbles the wallet out of his pocket and buries it as far as he can in the side of the couch, far underneath the cushions to the point where he can no longer see or feel it. He backs up just in time for the door to click open again. Soran, first of all, pays him no mind nor questions why he’s on the floor, but Myra?

She looks like she’s about to.

“You… live here?” he asks stupidly. He should have assumed that, apparently.

“General rule of thumb is that when you steal someone’s wallet you don’t immediately show up at their apartment,” she reminds him, none too gently. “How did you even know where to wait?”

“Someone downstairs told me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, tall, lots of tattoos, looked like he wanted to punch me on sight.”

“Fucking Trojan,” Soran mutters. “I’m going to kill him in his sleep.”

“You could try,” Myra says. “But considering you no longer have the—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Soran interrupts. “Just fix him so he can get the hell out.”

He’s clearly not talking to Myra, who looks honestly quite amused at the entire situation, but the girl behind her, who until this point had made no move to comment on the situation. She, above everything else, actually looks slightly _concerned_ , though it’s overshadowed by the practical neon of her blue-green hair. It’s hurting his eyes. Not much isn’t, right now.

“I’m not sure that’s fixable in one day,” the girl says, but she sounds abnormally calm about it. “Just saying.”

“Well, he’s not staying with me,” Soran insists.

“You live _alone_. I’m not bringing him with us. Jahaira will get home and have a goddamn field day if I do.”

“I’m not the only one in here that lives alone.”

“Because I’m asking _Trojan_ if I can move him in for a few days?” Myra fires back. He’s rapidly losing track of this conversation as the two of them go back and forth.

“Fuck Trojan. What about Tarquin?”

“Not happening,” the girl at the door interrupts. “He’s doesn’t know anything, that’s not—”

“I don’t care if it’s fair, maybe he needs a wake-up call,” Soran adds. “Better with him than in here.”

Icarus is still sitting in the same spot, awkwardly placed on the floor, and feels like he doesn’t even exist. He might as well not be here. They’re all looking at each other with varying levels of confusion and disgruntlement, but not once to him.

“I’ll leave after,” Icarus says. He wouldn’t be able to sleep under this roof without the thought that he wouldn’t wake up, anyway. Someone would get to him first; that though he’s more and more confident of as time passes. “I just wanted help, for now.”

Myra nods. “Noelani, just… see what you can do, for now,” she says. “If you want to leave after, you can.”

She looks at him, then. Those words are his and his only. He gets the sense that doesn’t really care, either way, but because she’s seemingly in-charge she has to. Something has to be done, and it has to be her doing.

He nods, likewise. Myra looks at him for a moment, and then shakes herself. “I’ll be back in a bit,” she tells them, and then slips back out into the hall, leaving Soran staring at the ceiling, as if it’s the only thing keeping him calm, and Noelani staring at him, mouth turned down in a frown.

“Are you staying?” Noelani asks. He almost pipes up with some sort of ridiculous answer, until he realizes she’s waiting for Soran to say something, in his own apartment, invaded by a stranger.

“What’s in there that you want so bad?” Icarus asks. With the look Soran turns on him, he wishes he had even the faintest clue. He didn’t think there was anything else in there - just that handful of cash and the few cards, so easily canceled and replaced. At least he came back with them.

So what does he want, really? It can’t be just that, but Icarus can’t dig the thing out of the couch to find out.

Soran lets out a breath, and then departs after Myra, slamming the door shut behind him.

Apparently neither of them are getting a verbal answer.

So far today, at least, Noelani is the least frightening person outside of the cab driver that’s dared look his way. She’s looking at him as if assessing the damage, but she can’t truly see all of it. Not the worst parts.

She crosses over to him, and offers a hand. “Come on,” she urges. He can’t help but look at her as if she’s about to do something awful.

“Where?”

“Bathroom.”

She’s going to help. He thinks, anyway. Myra said she would.

Not that he trusts that, but he sort of has to.

Icarus has run out of options, so he lets her pull him back up.

—

He completely avoids looking at himself in the mirror.

It’s not difficult. Noelani navigates him into the bathroom, the first and only door on the right side of the hall, and makes him sit on the edge of the tub with his feet inside of it, and then begins the lengthy process of unsticking his shirt from his back.

Icarus isn’t sure what hurt worse - the actual event, of which he remembers little, or her fingers attempting to peel melted fabric out of his equally melted skin. She says little, only the occasional _sorry_ as he flinches too readily away from her during a particularly harsh pull. At least someone is keeping their comments to themselves.

It doesn’t last forever, though. As he’s learning today, things rarely do. He’s still yet to get a good look at himself, but Noelani gets an eye-full, before anyone else, of what exactly has happened to his back and even beyond it.

“Wings?” she guesses quietly. He can feel how obvious it is; seeing it is something different.

“Not anymore,” he supplies helpfully. He’s never lived a life where he didn’t have them; it’s live for twenty years, almost twenty-one, and then die, a cycle that has yet to be broken until now.

All he knows confidently is that he was supposed to die, and who he is. Or at least who he used to be is.

Icarus isn’t really that without the wings.

“This might feel weird,” Noelani says. She’s masking the horror very well. He doesn’t turn to watch when she backs up, but the sink turning on a moment later explains what she’s up to.

“Tried dousing myself already,” he tells her, unhelpfully. “Didn’t work the first time.”

“This will.”

She sounds confident. Hopefully she is. There’s a faint, unnatural glow over his shoulders, a gentle coloring to the palms of her hands, and the same glow transfers easily to the water cupped in her hands. Not a single drop of it spills onto the floor, even when some of her fingers split apart to travel over his back.

Well, that’s not normal.

“Healing water,” she explains, without breaking concentration.

“That’s a thing?”

“Just about anything is a _thing.”_ Fair enough, but that doesn’t mean just anything can do what she’s doing. Even most things directly connected to the water can’t just heal people with it because they want to.

It’s a different feeling than he got from Myra, but unnatural all the same.

“What are you?” he asks. He feels like a hypocrite for asking the same question he refused to answer not long ago, but that was different.

He thinks.

He can feel Noelani’s smile behind him. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Ever heard of Camelot?”

“Now that is _absolutely_ not a thing,” he insists. He sees a flash of her smile, this time, but turns away just as quickly at the risk of his own reflection in the mirror. It looks as if she’s biting down on her own tongue to keep her smile from growing even wider.

“So, Merlin,” he says flatly. “Got it.”

“Not quite.”

“Well, you’re no King Arthur.”

“But I’ve got a sword downstairs, so,” she says casually. He blinks a few times to process that and gets close to nowhere. “It’s not all water. Not saltwater, anyway. Fresh water - you know, streams, rivers…”

“Lakes,” he finishes.

“Lakes,” she echoes. She’s stopped smiling, but something in here still looks satisfied.

Of course she does. As if she just goes around dropping information on unsuspecting, virtual strangers that she’s hundreds and hundreds of years old and widely believed not to exist at all, belonging in fairytales and tales of ancient.

But isn’t he the same?

“My name’s Icarus,” he says. Until now it hadn’t seemed important. If he was going to take off, what did his name matter, if no one was going to ask?

Noelani pauses, halting the blissfully cool feeling of the healing water over his back. Whatever she’s doing had been making everything feel at least a bit better; he couldn’t tell if it was _working_ , per-say, but even a little less pain was better than nothing.

He’s not sure what to expect, but after a moment Noelani returns to the task at hand, all without saying a word.

“Not even going to question that?” he asks.

“If I questioned everything that went on in this building, I’d never stop.”

“How many people are in here?”

“In this section? Eighteen. A grand total of one that is actually, totally human, nothing abnormal in sight. About four of us that are way too old, if you include me, and another large handful that are verging on it. We’re at a minimum for people with _normal_ ages at this point.”

With that many, it seems like a place the oddlings just belong without even trying. The bunch he’s met so far certainly confirm that theory.

That doesn’t mean he’s meant to stay here. Without the wings he’s effectively human, anyway. They may have allowed one, but who knows how they’d feel about a second. If what he’s thinking is true, about what Noelani said earlier, than the human in here doesn’t even know what’s going on.

It’s funny, really. Icarus doesn’t know much right now either, besides his own name.

He’s starting to feel less nauseous, though. That he knows. As the pain edges off, gradually, it’s a bit easier to focus, and the urge to throw up or die or both, simultaneously, gradually eases away as well.

“You came here,” Noelani says, out of nowhere. There haven’t been words exchanged in some time. “You don’t have anywhere else to go, do you?”

Certainly he does. He had a home _somewhere_ out there, he just can’t pinpoint where specifically, or who he was with, if he had loved ones or friends or any sort of safe haven that would take him back in. He was meant to have that after dying.

He wasn’t meant to have anything.

Thankfully he’s saved from having to think about that too much, or from having to answer at all, because he hears the door open once again. There’s a stark difference to the two sets of footsteps he’s heard the most of today - Myra’s aren’t calm, necessarily, but they’re not so aggressive either. He knows it’s Soran coming before he opens the bathroom door and just about hits Noelani with it.

Because of course he does.

“Are you done yet?” Soran asks. He blinks a grand total of once at the truly disastrous, continual state of Icarus’ back, and then apparently gets over it.

“No,” Noelani says. “And he’s staying here for a few days.”

“Excuse me?” Soran questions. That’s what he wanted to say, as well. He wasn’t aware Noelani was making the decision on that matter. Sure, it would be nicer than sleeping on the literal street, which was his next option, because there’s no way he’s getting that wallet out of the couch unnoticed and unscathed, but staying here? Soran’s probably going to kill him, anyway.

That’s what he gets, for his own stupidity in stealing his wallet in the first place.

“You heard me,” Noelani says. “This isn’t a one day project.”

“And you have your own apartment.”

“He’s staying here,” she repeats. “You have a couch. If he bugs you so much, ignore him. You’re just going to do it anyway.”

That would be for the best, Icarus knows. That doesn’t mean he’s planning on leaving him alone, but still. He can test his limits, see where the boundaries are. It won’t take long.

Soran is looking at the two of them as if they’ve both suddenly turned traitor - Icarus, sure, he was already one to begin with, but Noelani? Considering she’s the only one so far who has actively tried to fix him, he’s going to say that’s not possible.

He’s not expecting the abrupt slam of the door again, a noise he’s certainly going to have to get used to, as Soran departs once again, stomping away with a bit of anger that’s now surprisingly fitting.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he says quietly.

“I know,” she agrees. “But it’ll be better for you.”

What does Icarus think about that, exactly? He doesn’t know yet. He hasn’t even the faintest clue of how many hours have passed since he fell in the first place. How is he supposed to keep track of _this,_ when so much has happened already?

He has no idea, but it’s begun. Once you begin the story it’s often hard to rewrite it from the beginning.

He already fell. There’s no going back from that now.

And Noelani thinks it’s going to be good for him, so perhaps it will be.

—

“The second Noelani clears you, you’re leaving,” Soran informs him. Icarus can feel his eyes glaring over top of the couch. “Do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” Icarus answers. He’s heard everything Soran has said since Noelani left them alone.

He’s still not sure how he feels about being left alone with him.

He’s lying on his stomach on the couch with one ear pressed to the cushion, so hearing has even been difficult, but he’s paying attention. He has to, for his own safety. He doesn’t _think_ Soran is going to tell him, not with the leverage he has, but you never know.

He waits not so patiently for Soran to eventually get over his existing presence, retiring to his bedroom with one last glare and a punctuated slam of the door, as if Icarus was going to try and follow him.

Not likely.

Even once Soran is gone he’s still on edge, but that doesn’t stop him from digging both hands far underneath the couch cushions until one closes around the wallet. Even then he doesn’t feel comfortable pulling it out into the open, but he forces it open. He gave all of the cash to the cab driver, so there’s nothing left in the back flap, and he can still only feel the few cards. He allows his fingers to run over the seams, the worn leather, but there’s nothing substantial.

So what can it be, really?

There’s only one anomaly, a small bump far down in the first of the card slots. Icarus eyes the entrance to the hall warily - he wouldn’t be surprised to discover Soran has a sixth sense, popping back up at the most inopportune of times.

He leaves the wallet where it is, but wedges his fingers into the slot and pulls out whatever’s hidden down there, a small uneven shape larger than even the biggest of his fingernails. It’s so unexpectedly small that he nearly loses it somewhere in the folds of the couch, a difficult thing to find again.

It’s hard to see in the darkness of the main room; not a stone nor a jewel proper, whatever he has pinched between his fingers is silver and white and the palest blue all at once, reflecting hundreds of colors back at him in the non-existent light.

Another one of those feelings passes over him - an unnatural one. Something inhuman, but still possible.

This has to be what he wanted back, so desperately, what Myra was referring to earlier when she said he no longer had it.

But what _is_ it?

Whatever it is, it’s so small it’s a miracle he hasn’t misplaced it before. Icarus would have lost something like within the hour of gaining possession of it.

With that thought he reaches back in the couch for the wallet and tucks the nameless shape back in it, as deep as he can go. It’s rough around the edges, clearly beaten down in spots. It’s _old._

From what Noelani said earlier, there are ancient things living in this building, and Icarus might just be living under a roof with one right now.

Not living, he reminds himself. This isn’t a permanent solution. He doesn’t have one at all, mind you, but once he’s not at constant risk of tearing his back open and can figure something out, an opportunity will present itself, so long as Soran doesn’t kill him first.

He won’t, though. Icarus has something of his, and it’s important. Even without knowing what it is, and he may never, he knows it’s something big.

All the better reason for him to have it, really. It’s keeping him alive. If it can just do that for a few more days, little else will matter.

It takes a long while, even after he’s successfully hidden both things back in the deepest parts of the couch, but Icarus eventually falls asleep. It’s fitful at the best of times, riddled with anxiety and quelled panic and flinches that hurt his back at even the slightest noise, but sleep comes like always, just as death does.

It comes, but even as he’s going under he swears he can hear voices, just out of proper hearing range. Dozens of them, low and high, in languages he doesn’t understand.

They follow him, too. He dreams of them.

And for some reason, though he thinks wrong of this, they’re not nightmares at all.

—

It takes him too long to work up the nerve to look in the mirror.

Days. Almost three.

Icarus doesn’t even know how he’s still here, unscathed. For lack of a better term, anyway.

Whatever she’s done thus far has worked - Noelani visits him twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, and further attempts to fix him. Outside of Soran, he doesn’t see much else. Myra stops by a few times, but says little. Jahaira comes by once, from the second floor as he’s since discovered, and tries to talk his ear off for the better part of an hour, and even _he_ can’t keep up with it. That’s saying something.

He learns things, though. A few names of people and what’s going on, though he gets next to nothing from Soran, who avoids talking to him at all.

Honestly, Icarus gets that. If someone was hogging up as much bathroom time as he was in his own apartment, he would be mad too.

He’s locked in said bathroom right now; Noelani’s only been gone a few minutes, prematurely drawn off by someone claiming to be her brother, though he looked nothing like her. He’s not even going to begin to question that considering she’s at least seven hundred years old - she doesn’t even _have_ a brother.

At least she has someone.

It no longer hurts terribly for him to stand up and sit down. The wounds are closed over from whatever she’s done, not yet healed fully, but on the way there.

Really, Icarus is good to leave.

He’s not. Maybe he can’t?

He doesn’t know. He’s just scared to be out there alone. He’s scared to die for real, this time, when maybe he could actually live for once.

Still, though, Soran is here for once and pacing, as if he’s about to break down the door and drown Icarus in the bathtub once he gets in, which wouldn’t be particularly kind. It sounds like he wants in, but he’s not saying that.

He doesn’t think Soran hates _him_ , just the situation.

Or maybe he’s just being optimistic. Funny, because he never used to be. It’s not a feeling that has a proper home in his body and he thinks it’s dragging his bones down, too.

“Did you fucking die in there?” Soran asks, and his fingers tighten inexplicably around the hem of his shirt. Not that he had been doing anything with it beyond working up the courage to look, but even that may just not happen.

“Why? Would you be happy if I did?” he manages back. He sounds better than he feels.

Soran sighs. “Can you get out?”

“Are you going somewhere?”

As he expected, the hall is silent. An absent sound, though, is Soran’s footsteps moving away from the door, through and through with being exasperated for the day. It’s not even yet noon. For all the talents he seems to have gained a new one in the vein of annoyance.

“Can I come with you?” Icarus asks.

“I don’t recall inviting you.”

No, he didn't. Lack of an invitation or not, half of his inability to do just about anything has to stem from the fact that he’s going stir crazy in here. He hasn’t seen anything else for days. If Soran’s going out and not outright refusing, then it can’t be anything that important. Icarus could tag along.

Maybe.

He’s going to leave soon, anyway. One little outing won’t hurt anyone.

Icarus allows the door open a crack. Soran isn’t glaring, for once. “I’m coming,” he informs him. Soran’s face goes slightly more sour.

Alright, that’s enough on _pushing._

“You can have it,” he announces, stepping into the hall. He’s made no progress on the project that is himself, but apparently he has forever for that now, or whatever a normal lifespan is. He’s not even entirely sure. Soran looks at him, and then the bathroom, as if he’s rubbed poison all over every available surface.

Soran is quick about it, despite his initial hesitance, leaving Icarus just enough to find a pair of shoes in this apartment that even halfway fit him, as with everything else he’s essentially stealing and claiming as his own. It’s still not the most ideal of situations, but if he so much as breathes a word about his inclinations, he’ll lose his head.

And he likes his head where it is, thank you very much.

There's no time for Icarus to check that the wallet is still in its designated spot, though he knows beyond all rational thought that it is. He has yet to even return one of the cards, but Soran keeps producing money from _somewhere._ It keeps adding to his rising suspicion that he’s under a roof with something too old for its own good, harboring money and in particular, grudges against people who steals its things.

Not that Soran’s an it, so he hopes. He’d lose his head for suggesting that as well.

Soran still looks no more impressed when he locks the door and heads for the stairs. The complaint rises in his throat and then dies; Icarus at this point in his life is just taking stock. Soran said he usually took the stairs. He’s not lying.

So Icarus is taking the stairs too.

The worst part is he bypasses the parking lot entirely once outside, even though Icarus can hear a set of keys jangling away in his pocket. The walking is intentional. Everything he’s done so far has been. He only set the wallet down on the counter in the first place because there was clearly, in his eyes, no inherent threat to its well-being. That means Myra wouldn’t take it. Would she know what it is, then?

It’s a good thing to file away for later, but the desire to know is driving him up the walls almost as much as the stir-craziness was. Soran’s walking too fast for him to shove any sort of conversation in, up the side of the building and onto the main road. It’s taking all the energy he has just to keep up with him.

To boot, it’s a longer walk than he expected it to be. Soran had every single intent to drive, until Icarus tagged along.

Because of _course_ he did.

He doesn’t expect to be ducking into the most hole in the wall of places, something that he hadn’t even noticed at all until Soran veers to the left and inside, so quickly he almost continues walking without breaking pace. Unless he plans on standing in the middle of the sidewalk to gawk at what appears to be not much at all, then he best be going in.

So he does.

Of course, somehow predictably, Soran made him walk this far for _food_ , of all things. Not that he’s complaining, as has been established. He’s grateful to be eating at all.

All he’s saying is that there are plenty of places within a forty-five second walk of the apartment building.

Not that he’s checked. Checking would imply he was staying longer than his welcome.

It’s a clear choice, though, because Soran and the very fragile looking old lady behind the counter are already conversing in a language he has no hope of understanding, a too-fast version of Chinese or Japanese or Korean or God only fucking knows what else, whatever’s written on the front of the building in the first place. He’s not smart enough to know.

He’s felt ignored a lot, in the last few days, but never quite like this. Now not a single gaze is being directed his way _and_ he has no idea what’s going on.

Really, it’s not that far off.

The lady only looks at him, once. She smiles. It’s unnerving, but not terribly so. In the break of her conversation he realizes the quick, jagged sounds are far too similar to the ones he keeps hearing in the dead of night, when everything else is quiet.

Things he has yet to understand.

“Yuri,” Soran says, and it takes him a long, dazed moment to realize that’s a name. In English. Icarus nods. Soran goes back to whatever he was doing before, probably a neat and concise _sorry, he’s not currently a functioning human and doesn’t know how to speak like one either_ type sentence, something Icarus can’t actually blame him for it.

Then again, he’s probably getting shit all over right now, between the two of them, because Yuri starts looking at him more after that.

Is it better not to know?

Once they’ve finished speaking she writes something down on her notepad, takes the money he offers her, and then disappears towards the back, hollering something out. He watches Soran shove what looks to be an inappropriate amount of money into the tip jar tucked behind the counter and then drift away as if he never did it at all.

“How loaded are you, really?” he asks. “And can you stop trying to ruin my life indirectly in Chinese?”

“Korean,” Soran corrects. “And no.”

“What about the first part of that?”

“None of your business.”

“If you give me enough money to live on, I’ll leave.”

“You have both of my credit cards,” Soran reminds him. “And you’re leaving anyway, whether you like it or not. I’ll still make good on my promise to pitch you out the window.”

Or the fire escape, he wants to note. He should probably make sure that door is locked from now on. It could buy him some time in the future.

Still, Soran won’t, though. Not when he’s got the leverage.

“What _is_ that thing in your wallet?” he asks. The curiosity needs to be satiated. It won’t hold for much longer. Soran, until this point, had been either studying the ground or the glass-front door, and looks at him perhaps quicker than ever before.

“I thought you hid it,” he responds, slowly.

“I did,” he insists, even though he may have just blown it. He’s already lied plenty; doing it again won’t hurt anyone. “I just want to know what it is.”

Soran’s head has tilted in that awful, manic way that makes Icarus think he’s about to be eaten for lunch instead of whatever just got possibly ordered for it. It’s not a terribly fun look to be on the receiving end of.

He takes one step forward. For the first time, in all his steps thus far today, Icarus’ back twinges when he backs up.

“If you touch me, I’ll break it,” he threatens.

“If you break it, I’ll tie rocks to your ankles and drop you into the middle of the fucking Pacific,” Soran counters. If only he knew how much that threat actually made him want to clam up and disappear. Anything but the damn _ocean_.

Yuri appears again, and he forces air back into his lungs when Soran’s attention is diverted back to her. He doesn’t offer to take any of the bags Soran gathers into his own arms; he backs up out the door and waits for him, for a few moments, until he follows likewise.

Back… well, not home. He doesn’t have one of those anymore.

But what is it, then?

Icarus doesn’t care much about a term to fit it. He’s vaguely scared, uneasy at best, and even the clouds in the distance look as if they’re about to open up and drench everyone in sight. A fitting event, for such a mood. 

There have been clouds, so far, but not rain. It’s never rain here.

It’s a random circumstance, just like him. Something that isn’t supposed to happen in this time and place but does anyway. Perhaps everything is just out of the ordinary? San Francisco has fit the bill so far.

At this point, it’s just no different.

—

They don’t make it back before the rain starts.

Noelani’s healing water has been good for his back, but not this kind. It doesn’t come as a surprise, but the renewed pain isn’t so great, either.

Soran gives him a lovely quip of, “you’re bleeding again,” as they enter the apartment, which is the only time in the past entirety of them being around each other that Soran has ever been far enough behind him to tell. That’s only because Icarus is already fleeing to the bathroom as fast as his feet can take him, ignoring the promise of food because of how much his stomach is rolling.

He can practically smell the blood.

Soran doesn’t try anything and doesn’t come after him, either; he’s still standing in the kitchen when Icarus slams the door shut and yanks up his shirt.

He’s thinking too much either way. At this pace he just does it and doesn’t think about what he’s going to see.

And somehow, it’s worse than he thought.

There’s blood, definitely. Bright streaks of it down from the tops of his shoulder-blades, which seem to have split open again, somehow. Unsurprisingly, that’s nowhere close to the worst part. His entire back is a fresh network of scars and disfigured, melted skin, blotchy in some places and just _red_ in others where dead skin is still peeling away. The blood is hiding the worst of the scars, where the wings pulled out of his back at the shoulders in two stark lines, but the rest…

This is why the pain was so bad. Looking at it, he’s not even sure how he was standing, or how he made it as far as he did. If this is just the aftermath, how did Myra even look him in the eye? How did Jahaira and Soran and Noelani hardly _flinch?_

There’s a knock at the door. Another trail of blood beads down his back.

“Icarus?” Noelani asks. He reaches back for it as if made of metal, all movements robotic. He has yet to look away when Noelani cracks the door open even further.

And once again, she doesn’t even react.

“Do you have a sixth sense or something?” he manages. Her hair is sort of unintentionally distracting him away from the mess that is his back. At least it’s good for something.

“No. Soran came and got me.”

She guides him to sit down on the tub’s edge once again before he can even begin to process that. There was no way he ever would have gotten to this point himself, not when he can hardly breathe. Noelani is silent as she gets to work, hands as gentle as ever. It doesn’t do as much to calm him this time as it has before. Now he knows what she’s dealing with.

“It’s really bad,” he says eventually, unsure of what else there is to produce. It’s not as if Noelani doesn’t know that.

“I’ve seen worse.”

“How can it get worse?”

“You could be dead,” she reminds him, gently. He’s supposed to be, is the thing, and being dead would frankly be better. He wouldn’t remember any of this. Icarus would be living a new life, blissfully unaware, growing up again unscarred with no knowledge of the doom to come.

And that’s the way it should be.

“There’s no fixing this,” he says quietly. “Not… not really.”

“It’ll get better. If you give it time. Give _me_ time.”

Scars fade. Sometimes they even go away. These ones won’t, not never, but can they get better? He’s not sure whether to believe her or not.

Does Noelani have any reason to lie to him, though?

“You’ll get used to it,” she murmurs. Icarus doesn’t _want_ to get used to it, or be given the time to do such a thing. He doesn’t want to be so irreparably fucked up that he can’t stand the sight of himself in the mirror.

What’s worse is that he doesn’t _want_ to die. Dying is the only way to get rid of this. Even thinking of it is like feeling an icy hand inch its way up through his ribcage, all the way around his heart. Almost, but not quite, enough to stop it.

He doesn’t want to die, but he doesn’t want this, either.

So at the end of the day, which is worse?

—

Noelani, unlike previous times, leaves him to exist in the bathroom.

Typically she tries to coax him out but something changes at this. Likely the look on his face, or how silent he is once again. She departs quietly, gets him yet another shirt that doesn’t belong to him but is at least clean, and informs him that there’s something on the table for him, apparently from Myra.

It takes hours for even that to coax him out, and by that he means _hours_.

The apartment is a dark and stormy gray by the time he emerges; the clock above the stove reads ten past eight. Soran is smack dab in the middle of what he’s been daring to consider _his couch_ since he arrived here. With him sitting there, it looks much less something he could ever consider his.

The standard things are still on the coffee table. The remote. A haggard looking magazine that mostly looks as if it takes the role of a coaster, which is what it’s doing right now. Soran’s half empty glass. A takeout container that’s still faintly warm as he brushes by it, as if Soran shoved it in the microwave and then immediately into his mouth.

It’s not an entirely unlikely image.

He sits down in the occupied chair closest to the balcony. It’s still raining.

“That’s not mine, is it?” he asks, eyeing the remaining box on the table, a flat rectangular box. It’s recognizable, but it doesn’t make much sense regardless.

Soran shrugs. It’s more of a response than he typically gets; besides, his own phone is sitting safely on the arm-rest that’s only slightly closer to him than the opposite one. It’s not like it’s his. Icarus reaches for the box and tries valiantly to shove down any rising trepidation, sliding out what at least _appears_ to be a brand new phone.

“I think she feels bad for you,” Soran says flatly. Apparently he’s paying more attention to Icarus carefully plugging the phone in than he thought.

“Why? Because I’m stuck here with you, and you never talk to me?” A phone would certainly solve that problem, ignoring the fact that he has no real use for it. As everything powers on and loads in he can’t help but stare at the few numbers that have already been saved - Myra’s, for once. He already has a handful of texts that go along with Jahaira’s number, and just one from Noelani, an overly cheerful smiley face.

The phone is already pinging away as well, and Soran’s across the couch is lighting up in time with them, only silent.

As the messages flood in from a small icon in the top right, his brain is almost instantly too overwhelmed by it all, the constant buzz in the palm of his hand traveling all the way up his arms.

“You should turn that off,” Soran suggests helpfully while he fumbles for some sort of volume control, eventually silencing the phone. The messages continue to rain in as similar to the sky outside as can be, and they don’t stop even when he finally clicks on the chat to open it.

At first it’s all of the old messages, things from last week and the past few days all collecting in one spot. The dropdown menu along the left side lists twenty people - presumably the eighteen tenants Noelani mentioned in the first place, along with one unknown, and… him? 

Evidently so.

It goes quiet, eventually. The last message was sent just over forty minutes ago, a name and face he doesn’t recognize no matter how long he stares. That’s how it’s going to go for most of this, realistically. He has a lot to learn.

The time it takes is even less than he would have expected, and the silence lasts an even shorter amount of time. With his icon lit up green as he stares at the unmoving chat it was only a matter of time until someone notices.

A few messages come through. He stares again.

 **jaybird:** OH IS THIS HIM

 **jaybird:** HELLO

 **Myra:** No need to shout

 **jaybird:** but it’s EXCITING

 **jaybird:** when was the last time we got someone new, like never?

 **Kidava:** I moved in literally two months ago.

 **jaybird:** oops

“She’s a piece of fucking work, that one,” Soran mutters. He scoops up his empty containers and phone alike and swings back around into the kitchen. He’s only assuming he can mean Kidava, to get such a reaction unprompted.

 **Kidava** : Besides, you’re probably already chased him off, and I don’t blame him.

 **jaybird** : you suck

 **Kidava** : I will come upstairs and kill you, right now.

The chat name reads _2200 Leavenworth_ , the exact address of the building. So this is theirs, then, a grouping of their own design.

Icarus may almost be smiling at the simple stupidity of it all. Somehow, in a time when he has nothing and no one, others have still managed to form things around him. Life goes on, as they say. It wasn’t going to stop just for him.

 **Myra:** Icarus, you can ignore them, that’s what I do

 **jaybird** : HEY

 **Kidava** : I thought he wasn’t even staying?

 **soran:** he’s not

Icarus looks up. Soran is mostly concealed by the counter separating them and also a decent-sized chunk of wall. Even with only the smallest view, Icarus can tell he doesn’t look properly _annoyed,_ not like he usually does. He’s already gotten so used to the look that he knows it to be true.

There’s more difficulty in deciding what it actually means, though. Resignment? Now that Icarus has torn himself back open again and proven just how easy it is to do so, he doesn’t think Noelani will _let_ him leave, even if he tries. Even if he wanted to.

The fear has faded off. It had flickered back in for just a moment today, when Soran had rounded on him and taken a pace forward, but it’s back to normal. Their normal, anyway, a very thick silence that isn’t at all comfortable but is at least now worryingly familiar even after only a few short days. A quip here and there, Icarus wondering if his life is under threat a few minutes later, and all is right in the world.

Seeing Soran’s name pop up in the chat is jarring - he saw it on the list, along with the rest of them. Of course he’s there alongside the rest of the building. That’s where he belongs.

 **jaybird:** you can move in with me

 **Myra:** Over Sabre’s dead body, which is what you will be living with if you try to move someone else in

 **jaybird:** no he’d be okay

 **jaybird:** @Sabre new roomie?

 **jaybird:** <3

 **soran:** you don’t want him, he’s annoying

“That’s not very nice,” Icarus says aloud. He should probably type something back, sooner or later, but has yet to come up with anything worthwhile. He really isn’t, compared to all of this.

“A total shock to you, I’m sure,” Soran responds. “You don’t want to live with Jay. He’d probably annoy you to death even quicker than you could do it to yourself.”

“I’m taking that as a compliment.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“So who should I live with, then?” he asks. He’s got several more options according to this list, apparently.

“Anyone, so long as it’s not with me.”

“But not Jay.”

“Definitely not,” Soran confirms. As if Soran is giving him advice, the solid kind, on who to live with. As if he cares if Icarus gets annoyed to death or not.

Because he doesn’t. That’s something that’s become abundantly clear.

He’s not truly alone in this, though, is what Icarus has slowly begun to realize. There are enough people out there, or at least in this building, who are willing to look out for him. Sometimes, that’s synonymous with just letting him exist and not outright killing him, in Soran’s case. Icarus has no doubt that he could, but hasn’t yet for some inane reason that he’ll likely never understand.

He… he could live here. Maybe. Was a phone just the first step?

Maybe it’s just the delusions talking. He hasn’t eaten all day, and he spent another several hours locked away in the bathroom making his situation no better, and at this point he’s just grateful to not be on a repeated path to the graveyard.

So it could be impossible, but maybe it isn’t.

He survived, after all. That wasn’t supposed to happen, either.

He can feel Soran staring at him, so he doesn’t look up. He busies himself with typing out a reply.

There’s only two options, two reasons why his brain has started to think this way. One, he has nowhere else to go. Of course this path would be the most obvious when his life outside of this is unclear.

Two, he actually _wants_ to stay, and that’s more terrifying than he initially realized.

What if he wants to stay?

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here is chapter one! I'm thinking Thursday's will be the day for updates - likely not every Thursday, but we shall see.
> 
> There is a Tumblr for this story if anyone is interested, to be found at theforegone.tumblr.com, mostly just for posterity and my own satisfaction.
> 
> Hope everyone enjoys.


	3. The Side-Effects of Living

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: talks of suicide/self-harm.

**Monday, May 22nd.  
Twenty-two days before.**

Soran dying, at this point, would be nothing more than a convenient kindness.

There were words said to him, once, the explicit details of which are lost and the conversation fuzzy in the truest sense of the word. He has no idea where he was - in the middle of the fucking ocean, somewhere in the South Pacific. An island that had a name now but certainly didn’t, back then, or if it did was no longer the same anymore.

Sort of like him, really.

It was the first time he had ever left the mainland, and he _went._ It was hard to get to faraway places for most people, back then. It wasn’t so hard for him.

The woman had known him to be something, the specifics cast to the wayside. Back then it was easier to pick out people who had been alive for longer than they should have. Less people in general. God-awful life expectancy. His own mother had lived to be thirty-nine - that, in and of itself, was a visible miracle.

Looking back on it, this woman probably wasn’t right either. Soran wasn’t as good as seeing it then as he is now. He was still… new. Relatively. New being synonymous with four or five hundred years old is only something that could have foretold where he was going to be now.

That is: too fucking _not_ new.

It had been a language he didn’t know. A language, he’s convinced, that no one knew, because everyone else had passed her by like she was rambling nonsense, and she likely was, but he had heard years of it by then. A little more wouldn’t do him any harm

It was something like _you’re happy now, but will you always be?_ or _happiness won’t last forever, not for someone like you_. He could understand virtually anything, but sometimes the translations came out like garbled imitations of what they were meant to be.

At the end of the day, it all boiled down to his happiness. Back then, without realizing it, he _had_ been happy. He was going to live forever, if nothing got to him, and he could see the world, do whatever he liked. Actually _live_ unlike everyone around him.

So he lived. And lived, and lived, and lived.

And then it started to get old, just like him.

That was somewhere around the 1700-year mark. An absolutely laughable number, when you looked at it.

So it turns out, that woman was right. He was happy, to a fault.

Until he wasn’t.

The world changed around him. People died, as they were supposed to. He switched locations every few years to avoid garnering suspicion, changed his name and his history and oftentimes wandered down such trails of lies that it took him a century to get out of it.

It was a game. Games were fun, to a point. Games were only fun until all of a sudden they weren’t anymore. It stopped being fun the first time he looked at himself in the mirror and thought, casually; _do I even want to be alive anymore?_

Or maybe that wasn’t the worst part. That had come later, when he realized he knew the answer and didn’t have to second guess it whatsoever.

He was an immortal that didn’t want to be alive anymore, and he knew what that sounded like.

He was insane, then? Or just mad with the times? There were certain decades when shit like that just happened and he went along with it, got infected like the rest of the population. He had survived wars. He had survived _worse_ than wars and had the scars to prove it.

He had the scars that went along with not wanting to be alive, too, but he didn’t go around advertising them so much.

It was clear, whether he had gone off his rocker or not, that something was wrong.

Something still _was_ wrong. Eleven hundred years more had changed nothing, except for the fact that he maybe wanted it just a little bit more now.

The thing is, Soran could die, if he really wanted to. It would hurt, but everything hurt nowadays as it had the past couple hundred years. He would bleed out and for once not allow himself not to heal, not reach out to darkness that always reached back. _Just keep me alive._

Myra got on him for that, a lot. By _got on him_ he meant that she had found him once, the first and only time he had ever done it here, and had been so angry she had nearly put him out of his misery, anyway.

He’s pretty sure he had laughed, and that didn't help. Blood-loss made remembering things tricky.

What Myra didn’t understand is that it was different for her. She had always had Jahaira. Soran had been properly alone for centuries - never had someone at his back, under the same roof for long enough to be considered permanent, walking down the street next to him.

That’s why the look in Icarus’ eyes had started to worry him. As more days passed without him leaving, the look Soran saw grew increasingly to that of the fact that he was staying.

And he wasn’t.

He really couldn’t remember the last time someone had permanently existed in the same space as him. He couldn’t blame blood-loss for that.

It really had just been too long. San Francisco couldn’t change it and wasn’t about to either.

That was another thing, about Myra. She bought the building outright six months before he showed up, and by then she had already collected a conglomerate of species and creatures and things that didn’t need to exist but did, anyway. Mostly the girls. Jahaira collected friends like a bird did shiny things. He was still consistently surprised she wasn’t one.

Myra, being herself, let things that didn’t have homes find one, here.

He was the only one that paid rent money to her.

She hadn’t asked for it, initially. He hadn’t offered, either. If he was going to be something he was going to be it appropriately so, and hoarding just came along with the territory. He could have too much; he had nothing, growing up. It was a full-circle at its finest.

Then she had found him, though. She started splitting up monthly checks into once a week payments that she shoved under the door rather than in the mailbox downstairs, so that even if they weren’t communicating, she knew he was doing _something._

So he gave her money. Stopped resenting her for it, after a while. He went to sleep every night and woke up every morning and then asked the things that watched over him why he couldn’t have just died in his sleep.

They mostly just told him he couldn’t.

Maybe he was a coward. The thought had certainly crossed his mind before. If he wanted to die, why didn’t he get it over with?

Soran couldn’t remember what it felt like to think of a normal lifespan; he had been something for too long, and then he had caught it during a rainstorm of his own making, and the thought had never crossed his mind again.

He wouldn’t die. Living forever sounded like destiny, and destiny was no longer something he wanted.

Thus he was long-term doomed.

And alive, indefinitely.

It was all just irrevocably tragic, really.

—

When he wakes, it’s still raining.

He’s also still alive, but that’s something he’s grown used to.

The weather was always something he had, not something he gained. His mother knew it before he did. When he was sad, it rained. When he was mad, then the lightning came.

When he was beyond that, well… it just wasn’t good.

He didn’t feel sad right now. Irritated, slightly. That was an emotion he had been feeling a lot of lately. It was easier to pinpoint emotions than he liked. Living through them all a million times over did that to you.

So maybe the rain wasn’t him. Maybe, sometimes, the skies just opened up.

In San Francisco, though? Unlikely. He ought to move somewhere more conspicuous, where it wouldn’t rain, and people wouldn’t blame it on him when it did. Contrary to popular belief, the Northwest was the worst place for it. Seattle had nothing on their numbers.

Seattle would still be better than here.

The rain was like home. He’d let it rain every day of the year if he wouldn’t wash the whole place away.

That was one way to die, certainly.

He’s not sure anyone would really appreciate it, least of all Icarus, who is sitting perched like a gargoyle in the same chair he tends to sit in, now, as if it’s his. He glances not at Soran but out the balcony door once again, as the rain shifts to tap against the glass.

There are no words exchanged as he makes himself something to eat and Icarus flips incessantly through channels and then back through them once again. Only a few are occasionally crackling with static at the edges.

Soran doesn’t sit once he collects everything he needs. He leans against the wall next to the fridge and watches, waiting for him to settle on a channel.

He doesn’t.

Icarus’ gaze doesn’t break from the television. “Is that you?”

“Is what me?”

“The rain.”

He takes another bite of toast and finishes chewing through it as slowly as possible. Icarus clutches the remote a bit tighter. “What makes you think that?”

“So I’m right?”

“You’re stupid, for one.”

“True,” Icarus agrees. The easiest agreeance Soran’s gotten, frankly, in the past week. As if it’s been a week already. “I am right, then.”

“You’re something, alright.”

Icarus looks at him. He stares until Soran finishes his toast entirely as if it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen in his life. “Are you drinking coffee black, right now?”

“Is it offending you?”

“It’s disgusting me, actually,” Icarus corrects. “Did you know I haven’t had a single drop of coffee since I’ve been here, because there’s nothing to put _in it_? What fucking sensible human being doesn’t own cream?”

“My apologies, next time someone steals my wallet and becomes an unwelcome guest in my apartment, I’ll be sure to stock the fridge to their liking.”

Icarus has looked several things since he unwillingly met him. Mostly just different degrees of worried, stressed, or downright terrified. This is the first morning he looked none at all, as if a week has passed and he’s finally agreed to change his own mindset. Like Soran has already noticed, there’s been a shift, and now he’s the one that’s beginning to grow worried.

He ignores it in favor of putting his plate in the sink and then downing the rest of his evidently disgusting coffee before he goes to scoop up the dirty bowl Icarus has left on the table, because if he doesn’t grab it now it’s never going to go anywhere else.

First he steals things, _then_ he doesn’t give it back, and now he’s busy existing in all of Soran’s business.

It’s far from the most ideal situation. Then again, he hasn’t had very many of them in the past thousand years or so.

“Can I ask you a question?” Icarus wonders.

“No.” Soran turns the sink on, not quite to full blast but to the point where any sort of lengthy conversation would be difficult to hold.

He hears the footsteps but stays resolutely focused on his task. It’s almost tempting to shove his head under the tap. He's not sure whether he means Icarus' or his own.

“Well, I’m going to ask anyway,” Icarus informs him. He’s maybe two feet away, hovering beyond his back. “What are you?”

He finishes scrubbing the dishes, turns the water off with a motion that’s far too harsh, and then dries his hand off. The brief intermission has yet to put Icarus off whatsoever - he’s still standing there, waiting expectantly for an answer that he actually thinks he’s going to receive.

“So I can ask you and get nothing, but you have the right to know about _me_?” he asks, genuinely curious. “When did you go from terrified to even look me in the eye to downright holier-than-thou?”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m _not,”_ Icarus repeats. “I just… want to know. Listen, I know you must be old as fuck, okay, I can tell, so don’t even try that. And whatever the thing is in your wallet, that has something to do with it, and the rain is absolutely you.”

“You seem very sure of that.” More sure than he’s seemed at all in the past week.

Things are changing. They have been, since then.

“I am sure,” Icarus confirms. “I may have tried looking it up - turns out there’s like a million and one Korean things running around the earth.”

“You really are stupid,” he observes. He turns away, brushing past him, and heads down the hall. It’s as much of an ending to the conversation as the two of them are ever going to get. If Icarus was so bothered not knowing, why didn’t he just beg someone in the group chat that Myra had made the mistake of adding him to? Someone would sell him out, eventually. It wouldn’t even take that long.

Some of them would have already done it, in fact, if Icarus had asked, and judging from the amount of notifications he had woken up to, he had already been quite acquainted with many of them.

So he hadn’t asked. Because he wanted to know from Soran himself?

He couldn’t be that considerate.

“You already know what I am,” Icarus says. Soran pauses with his hand on the bathroom door but doesn’t give himself more than an inch to turn around when he looks back. Even an inch is too much.

“I mean, you know my name,” Icarus reminds him. As much as he’s been trying to forget it, he hasn’t been able to. “You saw my back. Even you must be able to put two and two together in that regard.”

Although Soran had questioned it that first day, rightfully so, he hadn’t put much thought into it since then. It wasn’t something to be deemed important because, at the end of the day, it wasn’t. Icarus was going to be gone soon.

Judging by the state of him, he should have been gone already.

It’s certainly something, however, to really be faced with it, to take in something that he should have never had to process. He did see his back. It was the only flicker of anything he had felt, though he had hidden it well. That was an image that came from people that were already dead, something out of a morgue after emergency responders had finally finished picking corpses out of a burned down home.

He had been ignited, properly. Ignited and then ripped to shreds until the reason he could take flight was then the reason he was falling, when they didn’t exist anymore.

It was easier to feel something when you could imagine it happening to yourself.

“You’re a story, you know,” Soran says. “Or at least you should be.”

Icarus nods, minutely. “Got the bad ending.”

Soran snorts. Rolls his eyes. “Sure did,” he agrees, and then slams the bathroom door shut behind him.

It’s a reassuring thing to know that he’s not the only person, or not, getting one.

—

Another day passes.

Noelani says he’s getting better.

No one breathes a word about him leaving, and Soran stops expecting them to.

And then another. Noelani doesn't even stop by until mid-afternoon, as if his care was rapidly become an afterthought. Myra tags along to observe and says very little.

Still nothing. He takes the bill Myra shoves under the door on third day when Noelani never shows up and then heads downstairs to retrieve the mail with Icarus following closely. No matter how many times he tells him he’ll be back within two or three minutes and absolutely is not going anywhere without him, Icarus either doesn’t believe it or doesn’t care.

He’s quicker on his feet now, doesn’t shuffle along and slouch his back like it hurts to stand up straight. He stands a hair closer than he used to while Soran fiddles with the lock that Myra insists isn’t about to break, nearly getting the key stuck before the mail slot flings open and spills envelopes all over his feet. Who even needs to waste this much?

Icarus doesn’t move to retrieve any of them; apparently bending down in such a way is too much of a risk to his back. When Soran eases back to his full height he’s examining the few empty mailboxes all the way to the right, eyes tracing over the numbers.

“Fascinating,” he comments. “Planning on moving out any time soon? Or ever?”

“Maybe.” Icarus has been gnawing at his lower lip so intently it looks as if it’s about to bleed.

Wouldn’t that be the dream? The interference in his life finally gone, or at least moved to another floor. He can’t exactly fault Icarus for staying when it hasn’t been made terribly difficult for him to do so, and evidently he’s getting over the threats on his life quicker and quicker every day.

Someone in here would buy him an entire apartment’s worth of furniture and pay all his bills for the next century, and they’d do it without asking. Hell, at this point, Soran would do it just to see if Icarus would actually, willingly leave. Something in him thinks he won’t.

Perhaps Soran really will have to throw him out the window. He has confirmation, now, that he has no way of saving himself if it were to happen.

The door opens behind them - he doesn’t bother looking, because whoever it is can have no possible effect any more than has already been had, but Icarus glances up and over. He senses the hand about to make contact and shifts up against the mailboxes, and the elbow Trojan had been about to throw at him catches Icarus sharply in the ribs instead.

Soran should really feel worse about that. He’s trying, but not much is happening.

“God, you’re still fucking _here?”_ Trojan asks incredulously, leaning around him to get to his own box. “You don’t look like a charred kebab anymore. Time to scram, I think.”

“He wouldn’t still be here if you hadn’t told him where I lived in the first place,” Soran says.

“Oops.” Trojan doesn’t sound the least bit sorry about it, nor make it sound like an error. He drives another hand forward, this time into Icarus’ back, to get him to move a good foot or so to the left.

He says nothing. No one does, in fact. Icarus looks at him, but there’s nothing pleading about it. He’s not anticipating Soran stepping in and interfering in whatever’s going on right now, just like he wasn’t planning on it.

Icarus has a mouth on him, though. If he wanted to start something, he would.

If he can tell that Soran is old, can he tell that Trojan is something innately and horribly fucked up? Is he not risking it?

Possibly.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Once again, Soran keeps his mouth shut. Trojan is going to ask the question no matter who it was initially directed at and what their response was. There was little point in him asking at all, if he doesn’t care.

Trojan leans in, so that up close his slight grin looks even worse. The only thing is, it’s directed at Icarus.

At least there’s no blood seeping through his shirt from Trojan’s hit.

“Did you really steal it?” Trojan asks. “If so, fucking kudos. Never give it back to him.”

Icarus swallows. With every mention of the thing the mere thought of it gets weightier. He thought, with enough time, that he could forget Icarus had it, and that if it didn’t matter as much Icarus would hand it back over, almost without thinking. That will only happen if people stop bringing it up, as if they’re trying to use it against him.

Only Trojan really is, and only Trojan will continue to do so whether he gets it back or not.

“Alright, one for you, then,” Trojan continues, at Icarus’ silence. Soran braces himself. “Why have you not just killed him yet? Do you want me to do it?”

“Bloodthirsty, are we?” he asks. “Haven’t killed any schoolchildren lately?”

“Nah, just older ones,” Trojan tells him. “I could add one more to it.”

And isn’t there just a _hint_ of fear in Icarus’ eyes at that. A threat is one thing, but Trojan openly admitting to murdering people in their downstairs hallway is another. It would be a bigger one, if Icarus had properly realized he was sandwiched in-between _two_ murderers right now.

He doesn’t think he’s a monster, though. Maybe only to himself. The difference is he knows Trojan is.

Trojan looks between them both. His grin starts to fade at the lack of a response; with no one playing his game, he’s getting bored. Sometimes that’s good. It means he might leave. Sometimes, on the other hand, it’s worse.

Boredom means uglier things come out. Darker ones.

“Well, that was fun,” Trojan announces. He claps a too-tight hand over Icarus’ shoulder, misses Soran’s when he takes yet another step back, nearly into the hall. “Let’s do it again some time, hey?”

His performance is nearly ruined by him leaving the key stuck in the mailbox a heartbeat too long, a second away from forgetting it entirely. Soran would have sooner dropped it down the nearest storm-drain before he gave it back to him, Trojan would have ripped the door off before ever asking after it, and Myra would have to fix it.

Myra had enough to fix, certainly where the two of them were concerned. Unlike Trojan, he didn’t particularly enjoy causing her grief.

He saved that for other people.

“Question,” Icarus says slowly. “Is he the worst one here?”

“Depends on your definition of the word.”

“As in the one most likely to kill me.”

“I’d say so.” Soran offers a shrug. “Everyone else would need a reason. He’d do it because he looked your way and decided he wanted to.”

“I just… I’ve realized that I don’t really _know_ anyone here,” Icarus explains. “I have all of these names and ideas of people that at the end of the day could add up to anyone, really.”

“So get someone to give you an overview, then.”

“Why can’t you?”

“You’re mistaking me for someone who has the dedication to go over all of it with you. You want the simple explanation? This place is nothing more than an oddity. A few things that are really bad, a decent handful that are surprisingly good, and most of all a lot that are stuck in-between.”

“And what are you?” Icarus asks. His curiosity seems genuine. It may have seemed as if such a thing would have been sated at getting anything at all, but that was something so insanely him it could have driven Soran insane.

That was a strength in and of itself; Icarus didn’t seem to think he had many.

He’s had too many years to decide, and Soran has never been able to put words to a question that seems so simple from an outsider perspective. He could give all of the wrong answers easily - a name, or a dozen of them over time, or even a species. They’re not lies anymore than his own existence is, but they’re not the truth either.

The truth is more dangerous than anything that could live here, and that’s that he doesn’t know. Once upon a time he may have.

What’s scarier, not knowing, or having forgotten in the first place?

“You know, you said Trojan is the person here most likely to kill me,” Icarus continues, having realized he’s getting no answer to anything else. “A few days ago I would have said that was you.”

“I wasn’t counting myself.”

“Okay,” Icarus agrees, a far too easy word. His lips quirk up at the edges, just the slightest bit, before he manages to wipe the look away.

He slams the mailbox shut, clutching the key in his palm too tight, until it hurts. Just a little bit more of this and then, inevitably, Icarus will leave. Whether or not he departs the building entirely matters very little - so long as he exits what little space Soran calls his own, this whole situation can be remedied. They can go back to where they were before. He can have back what’s his and Myra can fit bills under his door to make sure he’s still kicking, and the world can keep spinning on its axis, the way it’s meant to.

There’s an indent in his palm from the key when he releases his fingers. Icarus stares at the dips and grooves until he closes his hand around them once again. People looking never leads to anything good. Myra went prodding about and look what happened. Jahaira doesn’t know because if Jahaira knew the whole building would know. Often times Noelani looks at him in far too sad of a way to _not_ know, and while sometimes Mel gives him the same look he suspects more often that Mel just doesn’t know how to make an expression other than that, a frankly tragic expression for anything fitting the description of six-foot-something golden boy.

But they, at least, know what he feels like. The only real difference is they fought against it - Mel found Meris and clung on. Noelani found Topher and dragged him in, siblings in everything but blood.

It’s more of the same things that have been going on in this godforsaken mess of a building, something so brutally obvious that you think he would have left the day he got here.

And he fucking should have.

There are too many of them here, stark reminders that everyone here, to some degree, wants to live, and has found people that want to do the same. Myra and Jahaira have been by each other’s side since their first breaths. Meris and Mel became opposites in a world that grants them no favors and made it work, anyway. In an oddly similar yet wildly different fashion, Emmi and Arwen grew up as two exact same puzzle pieces placed in different boxes and fit so well together anyway that that was that, simple as can be.

It doesn’t end there, either. Even the people who ought to have remained alone still found someone; Mal went looking for Jupiter before he even properly knew who they were, and Percy unwillingly and yet unhesitatingly attached himself to Nic even when he knew it wasn’t the wisest of decisions. Nothing Percy did, frankly, was wise.

Still, though, he had made one decision and look how he was suffering for it now. Percy had made a decision, gained Nic, and then lost him just as quick.

Because sometimes, shit like that just _happened_ , no ifs ands or buts about it. No magic, either. Humans didn’t bow their wills to the same things creatures like them did. When humans vanished, they didn’t often come back.

Soran didn’t think Nic was going to be an exception to the rule. He _was_ the rule. He was a gentle nudge in the direction that Soran had always traveled.

The route that meant he was alone. At least alone meant he was safe from what could happen if he wasn’t.

“Are you going to stand there forever?” Icarus questions. He’s not sure how long they’ve been down here, the two of them, especially since Trojan departed.

So much for two or three minutes, alone. Sometimes it felt like Soran was never going to be alone again.

He eases past him, back to the stairs. Soran knows better than to touch him, now. There are no easy risks to be taken here; all of them hold far too much weight, and not one of them ends well for him. Just a little while longer, he was convinced. 

Just a little while.

Almost every single one of them would try to convince him otherwise. They would put him on a better, safer, healthier path. They would tell him that maybe something else would be good for him.

They could be right, too. He would likely never know.

The thing is, Soran didn’t want what they had. It was better never to have something than to hold it close for even a second and then lose it.

It was great for them all, this codependency thing they’d so unwisely cooked up. But it was also treacherous and reckless as hell, and he didn’t admire them for it.

Not for one second.

—

No one even stops by on the fourth day.

Soran does leave the apartment, mostly to get groceries because he still does need to eat and can’t entirely rely on takeout that Yumi tries to feed him by the truckload.

Almost stunningly so, Icarus makes no request to follow him, even after finding out about his intent. Not even the offer of a car ride, with no possible damage to be done to his sun-scorched back, can tempt him out.

He’s making himself at home.

It’s exactly what Soran is dreading.

He hopes, prays, begs that when he returns, Icarus will be gone. He thinks nothing of it when he opens the door and Icarus is still there, not even a spare glance to be sent his way when he steps inside and locks the door behind him.

Because he’s getting used to it. Another inch of dread fills his gut and stays there.

He makes dinner, silently, and makes more than usual because he knows Icarus is going to eat it whether that was the discussed plan or not, and true to the past that’s exactly what happens. It turns out he can’t blame Icarus for getting used to the familiarity when he’s anticipating it alongside him. That doesn’t mean he likes it anymore than he has to, and he doesn’t. He’s never planning on liking it.

He anticipates a question long before it comes. Icarus sighs quietly a few times, absorbed with something on his phone, but Soran feels glances directed at the back of his head as if he has eyes there.

His own phone has been going off incessantly all day. There’s a reason he hasn’t looked at it.

“What?” he asks eventually. It’s not that his curiosity is threatening to brim over.

The quicker he gets this over with the better.

“Nothing.” Icarus’ voice is indecently unsurprised for having been caught doing something Soran has no visual confirmation on.

“It’s something.”

“I don’t think it is. Who’s Nic?”

It’s something, alright. Soran knew it before the question even came out, possibly before Icarus even thought it. Nothing in this building works that way. It’s a lesson you learn quickly upon moving in, one that Icarus ought to get through his thick skull before they get too deep into this.

If he’s staying at all, that is. He puts the last thing away in the fridge and turns around. “Why do you ask?”

Icarus’ eyes are laser-focused on his phone. “Well, I’ve talked to everyone in some capacity. Some are more… forth-coming than others. He’s the only one I haven’t seen at all. He hasn’t even been online. You hadn’t mentioned him, so I was just wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

“If I should look out for him or try to talk to him. If I should be rightly terrified of him.”

He lets out a little huff under his breath. “Terrified. Right.”

“I just thought I should ask.”

“You have no right to be terrified of something that’s gone missing.”

“Missing?” Icarus asks.

“Missing,” he repeats.

“What does that mean?”

“Did you hit your head a bit too hard when you landed in the water?” Soran questions. “Missing. Absent. Nowhere to be found. _Gone._ Do any of those words mean anything to you?”

“What happened?”

“If I knew, don’t you think I’d have started with that?”

Icarus sets his phone down over top of his crossed legs, eyebrows furrowed. He can see the chat flickering away even from here. It’s about time he put his own phone on silent just to be rid of the noise for once.

There’s been a lot of noise, this past while. Soran can’t exactly blame any of them, even the worse, for raising it.

“People don’t just go missing,” Icarus says at last.

“Nic did. Stopped at the cafe, said goodbye to Jahaira, and never got back in his car. They never found him. They found his blood in the back alley. It’s been two and a half months.”

“So they could still find him.”

“They could,” he agrees. As unlikely as that is, but that’s a comment Soran’s chosen to keep to himself no matter who he’s talking to. “But keep your mouth shut. You say one thing, you risk blowing up ten others.”

A lesson _Soran_ had learned the hard way, frankly. Nic was a touchy subject, rightfully so. You brought it up to Percy, he lost his mind. Percy lost his mind and four others did in rapid succession. It was a ripple effect, except they were in a vast ocean instead of a pond. Not everyone would be able to struggle free from the undertow.

That was the trouble with being human and getting yourself involved into the businesses of things that weren’t.

Nic dug his own grave, as far as Soran is convinced. He picked up the shovel the day he met Percy and decided to stay.

People should never stay. He can’t help but think the same thing about himself. If that’s true, why is he still here? Why has he not left, by now?

“You really ought to give me the low down,” Icarus murmurs. “Like the real one.” His fingers are hovering over the keyboard, a thousand different options at the tips of them. Soran’s killed most of them with one sentence. He won’t say anything now.

It’s the most control he’s had in days.

“You don’t need one,” Soran decides, and that should be that. It’s as much of an end to a conversation as he’s capable of coming up with. Icarus doesn’t need information about people and things he’s not going to be around much longer.

Icarus sets the phone down, and this time even turns the screen off. There’s enough distance between them - he’s got the island counter and the advantage of just being generally faster and more prone to getting away from situations like this.

He’d rather not be in it at all, but life has a funny way of working against him. Strangely enough, it always has.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Icarus starts. He shuffles around, drawing his knees up. He looks more comfortable and wildly _uncomfortable_ all at the same time. “I’ll—”

“I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

“I’m not a terrorist.”

“That’s not how I see it.”

“Unless you consider me commandeering your apartment a political gain, then I’m not,” Icarus says. Exasperated isn’t a good look on him whatsoever. “God, just hear me out, okay? I’ll tell you everything you wanna know. About me, about what happened, about what’s _going_ to happen, not that I even fucking know, and in exchange you tell me everything about what’s going on here.”

“No.”

“Everything about the others, then. Nothing about you.”

“And you’ll be satisfied with that?”

Even Soran wouldn’t be. For someone who’s been as curious as Icarus has, he’s surprised the motion is even being entertained. It’s about who’s willing to give, here, and Soran certainly isn’t about to. He’s not the type. If it takes this for Icarus to learn, then so be it.

Icarus shrugs. “I guess I’ll have to be.”

He’s learning.

He rounds the island and sits down closer to him, on the edge of one of the stools. Icarus looks like a highly finicky bomb, as if one poke or prod will set him off. He’ll be no different than everyone else in this building, at least.

Soran wishes he didn’t want to know, but he hasn’t been this innately curious about something in years. When you live for as long as he has, you figure everything out, you know the ends of what anyone can be and what they can do. He’s never seen this one. It was supposed to be one of the very few things in this world that was fake, reserved specifically for online articles and debunked scholarly papers that have no connection to the supernatural.

And yet he’s real. He’s still surprised, for how many things that are.

“Well,” Icarus begins. “For starters I don’t even know when I was born. Thousands of years ago, I guess. Do you think we could look that up?”

“Probably.”

“Awesome. I don’t remember all of the details. Most of them, really. I only started remembering them this time because I didn’t die. I think… no, I’m sure that I’m supposed to die every time. There must be a date, or something specific to it, but I don’t know.”

“But this time…”

“I didn’t, yeah,” Icarus continues, voice unsure. He’s most definitely alive, but even he doesn’t look convinced. “I can’t even explain it. It’s like every time there’s this _feeling_ , something that compels me to go up and higher and higher and then I’m burning. Falling. Drowning. The works, like usual. Have you ever died, before?”

It’s not quite a challenging look in Icarus’ eyes. If Soran doesn’t respond, he gets the sense that the question we’ll be let go.

He sighs. “No.”

“Really? Never?”

Soran shakes his head. Unfortunately for him, he’s stuck here, until something gets him, and because fate is so unkind it’s entirely possible that something never will.

“You really don’t remember anything?” he asks. It’s easier to turn the conversation back on him than hyperfixate on the many negative aspects of his own life. It’s even easier to drown in them.

“Well, I didn’t,” Icarus says. “When I die it’s like I reset my own life. I’m born again, and I’m still me, and I get the wings back, but I don’t remember anything about what happened before, and that’s why I keep dying. It’s hard to stop myself if I don’t have any recollection of it happening.”

And he thought his own life was a mess. Soran doesn’t remember things because of how long it’s been, not because he’s been dying constantly and being cursed to forget it all.

Is it a curse, though? Some things would be worth forgetting.

Especially for him.

“There are still bulletins up everywhere for Nic, you know.”

“Okay?” Icarus asks. A slightly perplexed look on his face is better than most things.

“If you really were the same person, name and features and all, don’t you think that your face would be plastered somewhere by now? You don’t drop dead into the ocean and have no one care. You had family. You had people.”

“What if they just forget, like I do?”

“Or what if you aren’t the same exact person.”

Icarus props his chin up on his knees as he drags them closer to his chest, staring vacantly at the coffee table. Soran lets him roll through whatever melancholic thoughts he’s come up with in silence. It’s best not to interrupt something like that. People have tried often enough with him.

“I don’t know if I like that idea,” he says, eventually. Soran barely hears him.

“Well, you don’t know. What makes more sense - you, and only you specifically, dying over and over, or a similar version that just happens to have the wings?”

“Neither?”

He busies himself shoving things off the island into a vague semblance of neatness. He doesn’t know if it’s from Icarus or his own hastiness these past few days. All the while his phone continues buzzing away in his pocket, and his desire to pitch it off the balcony grows stronger with every single one. It can’t continue on forever.

Icarus keeps looking at them, miniscule swipes of his pointer finger that highlight each individual message before he swipes them away. He’s already more dedicated than Soran has ever been.

“If I really never have been this exact person before, then why me?” Icarus asks. “Why did I survive, out of all of the versions?”

“If you want a lecture on the Fates, go bug Myra. I’m not in the mood.”

“When are you ever?” Icarus mutters under his breath. Soran chooses to ignore that one, for both of their sakes. “You said you would tell me.”

“About anything else. Not that.”

“So tell me, then,” Icarus offers. He perks up on the couch and turns his attention around, watching Soran’s hands ease across the counter. He looks expectant, as he should, but not as if he’s in any sort of rush.

So Soran tells him everything he can possibly think of.

There’s no good place to start. He tells him about the goddamn gorgon twins and their missing, dead third, and how Myra might be more likely to kill him than Jahaira ever would be, but she probably won’t. If she hasn’t yet killed Soran, despite considering it, Icarus can take the challenge and survive too. He tells him about the frankly stupid, never-ending fae court war that seems to have been wrought by two people alone, something that’s only gotten worse since they lost Nic. Percy has no one to control him, and Mal doesn’t listen to Jupiter when he should. It’s far too easy to imagine what happens after that - Emmi and Arwen get involved, and where there’s water there’s fire to eventually douse it.

It goes deeper, into the wings and how many people could use them to fly far, far away from here. Icarus’ face darkens halfway through it. Soran doesn’t dare mention himself in that.

He lets him know just why he needs to stay away from Trojan, because Soran wouldn’t wish that on anyone, and who to thank if he ever has the fortune to have a particularly good dream, or who to curse when he has a bad one, though Meris doesn’t deserve it.

He tells him who doesn’t really, properly belong, and almost says himself in that too. Caiman, who never feels like she’ll have a home here, and maybe she won’t. Tarquin, who should have taken the hell off the second Nic went missing, when he saw exactly what happened to humans who strayed too far from their side.

The kids, who were going to die young if they kept coming around, if they stuck in their four. That was less a prediction and more a certainty.

By the time he’s finished, or somewhere close to it, Icarus looks drained, as if Soran has sapped all of his energy away. He makes no comments the entire time, choosing instead to sit in silence and let his brain do the work, for once, absorbing a load of information no one person is meant to take on.

They all did it, though, once upon a time or other. If the Fates had something to do with it, it just seems like Icarus was meant to be next.

He doesn’t like thinking it, but it could be true. He’s told him everything, or close to it. Not the secrets, because everyone has those and some need them, like he does. If he can take this information and find a home for it, Soran’s certain.

If that happens, Icarus isn’t leaving.

“I’m going to bed,” he announces, slipping out of the stool. It’s far too early to do so, but he doesn’t care. That’s enough for today. Icarus’ brain clearly thinks so too.

He doesn’t even make it halfway to the hall.

“I really hope I don’t die, now,” Icarus murmurs after him. “I’m fairly certain if I did I wouldn’t remember any of this.”

Any of it. Not what happened, or anything that happened in this building, and not Soran, either. It’ll all wash away like he should have, with the tide.

Would that still be for the best?

Icarus sighs, deeper than he has in the past, and then flops down onto his back. “Night,” he says. It’s not even properly dark out just yet. Soran waits for a flinch, for any sign of pain or indication that he’s as uncomfortable as he’s been since he got here.

He waits, but nothing comes.

He locks his bedroom door behind him and feels more sick than he has in years.

—

It’s not raining in the morning, though it feels like it should be.

The soft gray filtering in through the curtains points to overcast, at least, making it easier to stay in bed longer than he should, past any point that he would have allowed himself to before. Icarus is usually silent as death in the morning, at least until Soran is up and moving, as if he’s afraid to disturb any piece of something that he knows isn’t his.

He hears him come down the hall closer than he ever has before, enough room to still flee safely back to the living room if Soran were to open the door, but perhaps just near enough to hear.

He probably assumes Soran has died in his sleep, for how long he’s been locked in here.

He doesn’t expect the even, thundering footsteps down the hall - what he anticipates is wrong, too. A fist slams against the outside of his door, pounding and insistent.

“Are you dead in there?” Emmi shouts. In the very least, he expected it to be Myra, who doesn’t often yell so loud, because it’s not truly necessary. He can hear her just fine at a normal volume; Emmi’s vocal enough as is.

Myra would kill him for this, but considering it’s _not_ Myra, he keeps his mouth shut just to see how long he can get away with it.

Between the two of them he’s not sure who he can envision being more exasperated. Then again, if Icarus really did go and get someone, the first person he found, then what is that, exactly? Actual, unnerving concern? He certainly hopes not.

“I’m going to breaking this fucking door down!” Emmi announces. She absolutely will.

“I’ll kill you!” he yells back. Her feet slide back from the door.

“Good luck!” He can envision a number of things - her offering a cheeky wave goodbye, or her middle finger, depending on what mood she’s in. Likely the latter, considering him being holed up in his room halted her day.

He counts down five more minutes before he gets up and unlocks the door. More than enough time, thankfully, for Emmi to have left and for Icarus to have assumed the position, innocent and trying not to stare, in the middle of the couch.

“Next time,” he starts. “Don’t.”

He considers sticking his head in the fridge to avoid Icarus’ response, but turns out even that isn’t loud enough to drown it out.

“Don’t what?”

“You know what.”

“Go get someone because I was—”

“Carefully consider how you want to finish that sentence,” Soran interrupts, leaning over the counter to stare at him. It’s a smidgen gratifying that Icarus’ eyes flicker, some unknown emotion that’s not exactly fear but that’s scared in some respect.

“Right, my mistake, how dare I care or be concerned, ever,” Icarus says back. His voice is stronger than the look on his face. The two don’t match whatsoever.

This is the person who’s been ruining his life, and now he apparently _cares._

Nothing matches less than that.

Icarus’ eyes drift down, across his arms and to his hands, locked around the edge of the counter, and back up to his face. Suddenly he’s standing in front of him, the counter creating the only existing space between them. Icarus still thinks it’s smart, somehow, to reach out for his arm. He retracts both and steps away from the counter. There’s no easy way to get to him, now.

“Maybe I should be concerned,” Icarus says slowly. “Unless you’re going to tell me someone _else_ did that to you?”

So much for his secrets.

It was happening instinctively. He was hiding them. He’s had no good reason to, lately. Anyone who dared to look close enough in here had it figured out, or else they just didn’t care. He didn’t think Icarus would have the time to do the same, not a chance.

This is him, fresh out of hiding, guard down just a smidgen more than it usually is, an inch off a thousand foot wall.

And it was enough.

There are scars all over him. The worst ones just happen to be self-inflicted.

“You don’t even know how many times I’ve died,” Icarus says. “Hundreds, it feels like. And now that I can remember I’m just hoping I can stay alive, wishing that I can figure out how, and you’re…”

“What do you think I’m doing, exactly?” Soran asks.

“I wish I fucking knew,” Icarus says, back on track instantly, as if never interrupted in the first place. “I’m going to assume someone with that many scars really wants to be dead, but you’re still here.”

“Not a bad assumption to make.”

“You have no idea what it feels like, to realize you’ve died so many times over when you only want to live.”

“And you have _no idea_ what it’s like to live year after year, thousands of them, with absolutely _nothing._ No person, no real purpose. You’re just living, and one day you wake up and realize there’s no point to any of it. You’ve done everything you can think of, seen what you wanted. So what do you do then, huh? Do you have an answer for that? I’d love to hear it if you do.”

“Trying to kill yourself isn’t the solution.”

“If I wanted to be dead, I’d be dead.”

“So why aren’t you, then?” Icarus asks. Because he keeps begging them to bring him back. Because they keep listening. He doesn’t know why, to either. “Is the person okay with all the threats the same one that’s too cowardly to finish the job? Because that makes even less sense than the rest of it.”

That’s what Soran is, apparently. A coward. If he was true about all of this, he would have let himself go a long time ago.

So much of him wants to go, but there’s at least one part that doesn’t. His heart, his brain… he doesn’t know.

He just wishes that part would begin to fit in with the rest.

“I don’t even _know_ Emmi,” Icarus says. “But the second I said anything about you being holed up, she came looking. Is that why? Is that why someone is always up here checking you?”

Does it matter, anymore? He doesn’t think it does. He just knows he’s considering less shoving his head in the fridge and more trying to squash it between the door and the frame when he closes it. It might be less painful than anything else he’s ever done to himself.

Icarus looks like a lot of things, right now. Mostly he just looks upset.

Ideally, Soran would never like to see that look again.

“You’re leaving tonight,” he informs him. “I don’t care who you live with, or where you go, but you’re leaving.

He expects resistance. It’s typical of their relationship so far. One pushes, the other pulls away, or shoves back. It’s never easy.

And yet Icarus says _nothing_. His hand is buried in his pocket and Soran can only imagine it’s in there, just out of reach, and he’s not going to get it back. The one thing he’s displayed care for, _desperation_ , and Icarus now knows how much those emotions are worth, when it comes to him.

It certainly doesn’t seem like he’s going to give it back.

If that’s not the nail in the coffin - his, possibly, he doesn’t know what is.

—

Soran leaves for a while.

The most delusional part of him thinks that when he comes back, Icarus is going to be gone, for good this time.

And yet he isn’t surprised in the slightest to find him still there.

He’s leaning up against the couch, watching the rain beat against the doors out to the balcony. The sky looks angrier than it has in a long time.

“How is it not always raining?” Icarus says, though it’s meant more for himself than a general audience, and definitely not for Soran, either. That doesn’t mean he’s not listening. These days it’s harder to ignore than listen, not that listening has gotten him anywhere either.

It would be easier not to say anything. Soon Icarus will be gone, and this chapter will be thankfully closed. Everything will go back to normal. Fate can decide if that’s for the best, or not; it seems to be doing enough work lately.

Maybe not quite the amount it should. If fate were kinder, it would let more people go instead of scarring them beyond belief.

He’s not the only one in the room like that.

“I can’t control it,” he says. Icarus jolts, slightly, as if he expected Soran’s voice as much as Soran himself did.

His eyes are still firmly fixed on the storm outside. It’s not even that late, yet, but already the streets are deserted because of it.

“I thought you could control it,” Icarus says, finally. Icarus has been thinking a lot of things that aren’t true.

“I can,” he confirms. It feels like far too large of an admission for someone who’s about to make his exit, but he can’t take it back now. “I can do whatever I want with it. But sometimes it’s just my emotions. And it’s completely out of my control when I don’t have—”

“The thing you won’t tell me about. Right.” Icarus lets out a breath. He definitely has it on him. Soran should just cut his losses, kill him right here, and take it off his still-warm body. “Are you ever going to tell me what it is?”

“I’ll tell you when you need to know.” Never.

“It means that much?” Icarus asks. “You can’t live solely for an object.”

He is. That _object_ is the only thing standing between him and death when he’s right on the brink of it. It’s the only reason Myra found him alive instead of dead that day, why she didn’t have to get Noelani to fix him.

“I’ve managed,” he decides on, finding no better words.

“Have you?”

“Are you my fucking therapist now?” Soran asks.

“Maybe. I think someone should be. You’re right, okay, I’ll concede to that - I don’t get how you’re feeling, but what I do understand is the feeling of being seriously, irreparably fucked up and thinking you need to punish yourself as a solution. I feel that way right now.”

“Get back to me when you’ve felt it for a few hundred years.” He was stuck on Icarus admitting he was wrong, initially, but it’s best that he ends this quickly, before Icarus crests the cliff of any emotion that Soran isn’t particularly equipped to deal with.

“You don’t get to shove everyone out of your life,” Icarus says.

“And you're not in it, because you’re leaving. Remember?”

“Do you actually want me to?”

“Yes.”

As of right now, it’s the truth. He’s not going to let the thought mull long enough for him to think otherwise. That’s what’s best for both of them.

Soran knows that, for once. He doesn’t often have concrete answers for things the way he does for this.

He doesn’t know him. There’s no reason for him to stay.

It’s as simple as that.

He’s done with being psychoanalyzed, with the feeling that he’s a moth pinned under a microscope, both wings about to be ripped off from the root. He deals with enough things; any more added to his plate will tip him over the edge that he’s been hanging onto for years.

“You can’t live for an object,” Icarus repeats, testing each word out. He’s just stepped into water that’s far too deep for him to survive, especially when he’s already drowned so many times before.

And Soran’s not getting it back. This he knows, now.

He takes a step closer. It has the same effect that it did last time, a point he thought they were passed now. Icarus hasn’t looked scared of him in a while.

Then again, is this fear? Is Icarus still frightened of something that wants to die almost as bad as he wants to kill him?

“Listen to me,” he says. “You’ll give it back, one day. Whether it’s of your own volition or because I kill you in your sleep doesn’t matter.”

He leaves a lot of things unspoken in that. It would be so much easier for them both if Icarus gave it back right now - he would never have to speak to him again, or even look him in the eye so long as he leaves the building for good. It also gives him an option, and those options decide their future. He gives it back now, nothing bad has to happen. He keeps it, they continue on like this. One day Icarus won’t wake up, if he holds onto it for long enough.

It’s all about what he wants. Icarus can make his own decision.

In fact, he’s already made it. Soran’s had a few centuries worth of practice at reading people, and Icarus is like someone left a book pinned open face-up on the table.

He takes another step forward. They’re too close, now. Icarus doesn’t flinch; he’s dedicating energy, all of it in fact, to not moving.

“If you touch me,” he starts. Soran’s heard that one before. It sounds more like a joke now.

“You'll break it, I know,” Soran says, and then wraps a hand around his arm anyway, until his skin is at risk of bruising. “ _So why aren't you_?”

He knows exactly how much pressure to apply to snap his wrist at the perfect angle. He doesn’t need anything at all to do that. For something he learned so long ago it’s still certainly… applicable, in modern times. They both have one free hand. One that could break it, and one that could try to stop him the second he moves. Icarus’ bones are fragile underhand - not fragile enough that they shattered on impact with the water, but everything breaks eventually.

He’s living proof of it.

So Icarus could break it. He could break Icarus, too.

It’s a fair trade.

“I’ll leave,” Icarus says, voice even. As if it was ever a question - Icarus was always leaving. It’s just what he was leaving with, where he was going, when he was going to do it. All of the fundamental questions, and they’ve been answered. Soran doesn’t care where he goes; he just wants him gone.

Soran lets go. Icarus rubs at his wrist for a moment, eyes downcast, and doesn’t raise them as he turns for the door. He has nothing to his name except for it, and he doesn’t even know what it is.

He didn’t break it. That means something, surely. It has to.

Watching him close the door, though, it feels like Soran just got further from it than ever before.

It’s intact, but is anything else?

And better yet, is he?


	4. The Side-Effects of Dying

**Monday, May 29th.** **  
** **Fifteen days before.** **  
  
**

The time scratches past midnight, and Icarus is still angry.

Okay, scratch that, he’s not  _ angry. _

He’s beyond that.

He’s furious. He’s upset. He’s deeply saddened, for some terrible, abnormal reason that unseats every rational emotion inside him. He walks, for a few hours, until it’s darker than it ever has been before and he has nowhere left to circle to.

It rains the whole time. It makes him even angrier.

There’s nothing to curse, no God or reason. Just Soran, and the fact that he can’t even control it. If he’s not controlling it, then  _ he’s  _ out of his own control. His emotions are flooding out and spreading in such a way that he can’t keep track of them. It’s sort of like how Icarus feels right now.

He’s going to go back, at some point. He doesn’t know where else to go. Even if he has to sleep in one of the halls, he will.

That thought is what eventually drives him onto a bus. He’s fled so far down Leavenworth he no longer recognizes his surroundings and takes all of the spare change he dug out of Soran’s kitchen drawer to get into it, leaving almost nothing. He makes sure to get a return slip. He has to come back, even if he doesn’t want to. He’ll die out here.

His pride isn’t wounded thinking it. He’s not stupid.

The time spent on the bus is far too long. Everyone who was there when he stepped on trickles out, eventually. Some of the numbness seeps out of his extremities, and although the seat underneath him is still damp with every passing minute he gets drier. He checks his phone - the screen still carries spots from the rain, but he wipes them away and checks the time.

It’s been nearly an hour.

He chances a glance out the window. The city is behind them - quite far behind them, but it’s so bright you could never miss it. There’s nothing overly distinctive about where they are now; it looks mostly residential, with lots of rolling hills. The waves, not far to their right down a series of them, looking angry crashing up against the shore.

He stuffs his phone far back down, makes sure the return slip is alongside it, and hits the button to stop. The garish neon of the sign towards the front of the bus reads something-something Pacifica, just before he gets off. A wide, four-lane road lies before him, something that reads more like a highway than something you should be letting people off on.

Icarus follows the road for no reason other than he has nothing else to do. He got off for a reason - he has an idea what the reason is, but it’s settling uneasily in his stomach.

He still gets the sense that he’s going to do it.

Something in him, an unconscious part that perhaps never made good decisions ever, sees the road that cuts off from the highway and winds up into the greenery, and immediately decides to follow it. There was a sign at the entrance, too dark to properly make out. Something about orchards. It sounds like it’d be nice if it wasn’t pissing down rain.

There are clusters of low-lying greenhouses not far up the twisting road, and then another after a hundred more meters. He finds the final set where the road ends, and his feet crunch into a gravel parking lot where presumably, during the day, cars would be flooding to. Everything ends there. Even the trees aren’t so thick. It really does look like a place that could be enjoyable if the trees weren’t shaking and swaying over the path at the end of the lot, rain washing over the sign at its head. Sweeney Ridge, Golden Gate National Recreation Area. People come here all the time. The path is wide, well-maintained.

He keeps walking, away from the greenhouses and any signs of civilization, tire tracks in the gravel, and further up into the hills.

There are still signs of life, but the footprints from whatever poor suckers were out here today have filled up and nearly washed away. This place has to be safe, but something in him is uneasy. The tall grass is practically  _ alive,  _ swaying in such a way that makes it seem as if something is about to come crawling out of it. There’s no way this place is empty. Things live here.

Anything, realistically, is worse than he is.

He walks fast. Too fast, and nearly pays the price for it too many times, but steadies himself along the path as he continues in further and higher. He could see everything for miles if the rain wasn’t so torrential, all the houses and their lights, where the trees come back and grow taller again. He could see that nothing was coming out of the grass towards him.

But he couldn’t, not right now, and it was terrifying.

Icarus veers off the trail at the next highest point he finds. There are trees not far off of it, and that’s what he heads for. His hands return to their homes in his pockets, seeking the last little bit of warmth left in them, and find not his phone, nor the return ticket, but the little stone still nestled safely inside.

He shouldn’t do it.

Icarus grabs it, and throws it as hard as he can.

He sees the arc of it in the air for one brief second before it’s gone. It disappears. Somewhere in the trees, in the grass, where there is no intention of it being found.

And isn’t that just the point.

Icarus stares after it for a moment, wherever it could be. If he was desperate, he could likely find it. It wouldn’t be easy, but he knows his own strength, the trajectory. With enough time, he could do anything.

But he’s not.

He slips back onto the trail in silence; the rain is loud enough for all of them, tonight. A part of him feels as if it grows stronger, buffeting even harder down onto his shoulders. Soran can’t possibly know that it’s gone, not yet. He’s not going to know until Icarus tells him.

He’s still angry. He’s going to get back on the bus and return to San Francisco, and he’s going to tell him that he can’t live for it, not anymore.

And then he doesn’t know what, but he’ll figure something out.

He always does.

—

His feet are burning by the time he gets back to the apartments.

Or as close as they can be, anyway.

There’s that saying, or that feeling, that returning from something always takes less than the journey out in the first place, but that’s no longer the truth. Getting off the bus is easy, and so is the first block or so, but every block after that is painful. He wouldn’t be surprised if his feet were blistered and bleeding, slip-sliding in the soaked soles of his shoes.

The stairs hurt every part of him, but something in him takes them up anyway. He bypasses where he knows he ought to go, past the second floor and up to the third. There’s a long moment filled with nothing but the rain slamming up against the building’s weathered side as he stands outside Soran’s door, wondering what the hell he’s doing.

Proving a point. That’s what.

He slams his fist against the door. There’s a chance Soran is asleep, if he ever sleeps at all. Icarus doesn’t actually  _ know _ . He doesn’t know much.

There’s also a chance the knock could go unanswered, but he doesn’t think Soran can tell the difference between who’s Icarus and who’s someone he’d actually deign to converse with. Not that there’s many of them, he thinks.

Footsteps. He’s just going to say it. Nothing more. He’s already gone and done it; he just needs to finish it off.

Soran opens the door. The chain locking it shut shows him a rough half an inch of his face, but even that bit is disgruntled.

“That lasted long,” Soran comments, his voice flat. Less than unimpressed. It’s been a few hours, but even Soran thought he would last longer.

Soran thinks he’s crawling back, begging for shelter.

“I got rid of it,” he says. He keeps the tone of voice steady, almost uninterested. It’s like any other normal conversation - all he has to do is get through it like every other one and then move on with his life. It’s just for the best.

Soran’s expression doesn’t change. “What?”

“Your thing. Whatever it was. I got rid of it.”

He expected… more, for some reason. If it really was as important as everyone was making it out to be, then the emotions ought to have been more at stake. Like the five stages of grief, except he expected nearly all of them to be related to anger.

“Got rid of it,” Soran echoes.

“Yeah.”

“Got rid of it as in you hid it in my couch for weeks and thought I didn’t know?”

A nervous spike of adrenaline hits him right in his core. Soran  _ knew _ ? If he knew, why didn’t he just flip Icarus off the couch whilst he was sleeping and take it back? There’s little he could have done to stop him. Every day he let Icarus put it back in his pocket and hold into it, and for what? Was there a reason?

And now he’s angry again. It’s like Soran’s been toying with him this whole time. He’s always known.

At least Icarus has a weapon, now.

“Got rid of it,” he starts. “As in I got as far from this fucking place as I could, and I  _ disposed of it  _ in the middle of nowhere. Certainly nowhere you’re ever going to be able to find it. I don’t even think I could.”

A lie. A bold-faced one, at that. If Icarus was desperate enough, he could find it. How could he ever be desperate enough, though?

It’s hard to see when he doesn’t have much to see at all. Soran’s fingers go first - they turn white around the edge of the door. Icarus waits for it to splinter, but nothing happens. It seems like something that should realistically be possible with how hard he’s holding onto it. His eyes follow. He was calm, for a while. With Icarus locked out, of course he was going to be calm. Little does he know he should have allowed him closer. He sees a few things - anger, blatant resentment, a sense of disbelief as if he’s not willing to believe it’s actually gone.

And then, rapidly, anger again. Murderous, full scale, I’m going to kill you where you stand levels of anger.

Icarus grabs the door handle. “Good luck living for something you don’t have,” he says, and then pulls it back. The door slams shut. He hears, vaguely, the sound of the chain rattling in pace as he flees back down the hall, and then nothing else.

He thinks Soran might open the door, but he’s already down the stairs.

It’s his first course of action, and really his only one. Sure, he’s talked to just about everyone in here, at some point, but there’s a select few who might be willing to take more pity on him than any others. There are only three doors on the second floor - two are not good, and of the two one is really bad, if Soran’s opinion of Kidava is anything of merit.

He goes for the door on the left side of the hall, standing alone, and knocks. It’s a hesitant thing compared to what just happened upstairs and he holds his breath the entire time, looking back at the stairs. He wouldn’t be surprised to be smited where he stands right now for what he’s done, tonight. Soran would find a way.

Jahaira finally opens the door, hair piled on top of her head to resemble a bird’s nest, he thinks, and some sort of mask across the bridge of her nose. She looks like she’d hit him with the door if he wasn’t going to step back in time.

She looks him up and down two times over. “Did you have fun outside?”

“Please,” he says. There’s no other words he can use to express what he needs. Someone has to get it.

Myra swivels on the stool at the kitchen island, fixing him with a look despite the spoon dangling from her mouth. She pops it out to speak to him, at least.

“Did he finally get sick of you?” she asks.

“Something like that.” She nods, sagely, as if she already knows why, and shovels another spoonful of cereal into her mouth without breaking eye contact. She doesn’t. He probably shouldn’t tell her, either. There’s got to be some sort of solidarity between things that are just way too old, things that shouldn’t exist.

Speaking of, it’s reminding him how deeply uncomfortable he is being stuck in here with the two of them, knowing what they are and what they could do. Noelani is one thing, and she gives him a friendly little wave from the couch, but these two?

If Soran doesn’t kill him, one of them might, first.

It occurs to him that he’s still dripping water, and he’s accumulated a puddle wherever he goes. Jahaira is staring at it like it’s offending her.

There’s a lot that’s been offending him today.

“So,” he starts. Might as well burst the bubble right off the bat. “How long has he been trying to off himself?”

Jahaira stares at him. Myra evidently inhales a piece of cereal and then chokes. Painfully slow, Noelani reaches over and pauses whatever she had been watching on the television. The second Myra stops coughing she turns on him, again, but nothing comes out except a little wheeze.

“What?” Jahaira asks.

“Don’t repeat that,” Myra manages. “I’m serious.”

“You obviously know.” He points a finger at Noelani, likewise. “And you must, too, because there’s no way he’d be alive otherwise.”

“That’s not — ”

“He told you?” Myra interrupts. Noelani sits up but lets the rest of her sentence die in her throat.

“No. Am I branded stupid, or something?”

“Apparently I am,” Jahaira mutters under her breath. “Are you  _ serious _ ? Why does no one tell me anything?”

“Because it’s not my business to spread,” Myra spends. She dumps the rest of the bowl’s content down the drain and then slams it into the sink, just a little too aggressively. “And frankly it’s not yours, either.”

“If I’m living with him — ”

“You’re  _ not _ ,” Myra breaks in. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You wouldn’t come grovelling if he was letting you back in, probably because you found out.”

“He didn’t deny it.”

“He didn’t tell you, either.”

So what was Icarus supposed to do? Ignore it? It was staring him right in the face. That’s not something he could willfully look away from. Okay, it concerned him. Point blank, truthfully concerned him. That’s not a crime. Someone would have to be clinically insane for that to not have any sort of effect on them.

Or, perhaps, if they didn’t know. Jahaira’s biting hard on her bottom lip; for something that could kill him with one look, she’s shrunk in on herself now.

More people than the ones in this room know. He’s convinced of it.

But who? How many? And how many of them aren’t doing anything?

At least he tried to do something.

“Fuck’s sake,” Myra mutters under her breath. She skirts around them both and disappears into the hall; the door had still been left wide open, until that point. She slams it shut behind her.

He can hazard a guess as to where she’s going, but he doesn’t have any expectations for her progress. Noelani stands up too, shedding the blanket previously draped over her knees.

“My brother’s at his friends for the night. You can sleep in his room. I’ll go… see if I can find clothes anywhere.”

He nods. She slips out after Myra, as if she was never there at all. Icarus hopes she has the good sense not to ask Soran for anything of the sort. He’s left standing in the middle of the vast apartment with Jahaira by his side.

She rubs a hand over her eyes. “Jesus,” she whispers, something rattled in her voice. He watches her back as she retreats all the way down the hall and then, presumably, into her room. The door closes quieter than any previous times.

It’s foreign in here. Filled and cluttered like a home, but unfamiliar, too big.

He already, ungratefully, does not want to be here.

He props open doors, save for Jahaira’s, all the way down the hall until he finds the bathroom, and then locks himself inside. He looks haggard, once again; the look, at least, he’s got down pat. Someone could easily mistake him for a flooded out sewer rat.

He’s in the middle of attempting to peel his shirt off when footsteps go stomping by - Myra, he presumes, because there’s no way Noelani ever willingly makes that much noise. It wasn’t a very long conversation, if she managed one at all. Some part of him hopes she did. He doesn’t know why.

Noelani is close behind. She knocks, ever correct on her assumption to find him hiding in a bathroom, and hands him a clean set of clothes. He doesn’t ask where she got them.

Truth be told, he doesn’t want to know.

He spends so long in there, dry at last, that he expects someone to demand their time. He hears the television go off. Myra never goes stomping by again. He thinks Noelani pauses outside the bathroom door once again, but then she is gone too, leaving him properly alone. He hasn’t been, in a while.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore. It felt like he had a purpose today, asinine as it was. Now, though? He has no clue.

Eventually all of the lights go off, too, save for the one that reflects back his exhausted face in the mirror. 

He flicks it off and finds the empty, remaining bedroom in the dark, shuffling through the apartment in silence. It’s the first time he’s slept in a bed in a long time.

It’s not like it matters, though. The rain keeps him up half the night anyway.

—

Icarus finally falls asleep.

He wakes up to Myra staring at him.

“Please don’t,” he insists, half into the pillow. He doesn’t even know what he’s pleading for. His life, perhaps.

“I wanna talk to you.”

“Do I have to?”

“If you’re staying in my apartment, yes.”

He groans, rolling over. It’s  _ still  _ fucking raining, and the room is dark as can be. The whole city is going to go under soon if Soran doesn’t figure it out, and Icarus will wash away alongside it.

Myra, thankfully, at least leaves the lights off, though she flops down onto the end of the bed and hits him in the shins at least three times while she wiggles around. At least he’s mostly safely contained in the blankets that don’t belong to him.

She doesn’t say anything, for a bit. He’s content to use the time to blink himself awake, letting himself become accustomed to the surroundings he couldn’t see very much in the dead of night, no matter how much his eyes adjusted.

“I’ve felt that way too, you know,” she says out of the blue. “I’m sure a lot of people - things, have. The only difference is I have an excuse, if you want to call it that. I’ve always had Jahaira.”

Icarus doesn’t get it. He could walk around and charade all he wants, but he doesn’t. Maybe if he had actually been alive for the past few centuries instead of periodically dying and then forgetting about it he would feel the same way. It’s difficult to imagine even then. Icarus never  _ wants  _ to hurt. Can he say the same about Soran?

“If he wants out so badly, all he’d have to do is leave. If Noelani wasn’t around…”

“Noelani doesn’t heal him.”

“Then who does?”

“He heals himself.”

“What?”

Myra sits up, a bit. She hits him again in the process. “He really didn’t tell you shit, did he?”

“Every time I asked him a question it was as if I had offered to start pulling his fingernails off.”

“I pried it out of him,” she admits. “Some of it, anyway. I’m sure I’ll never have the full story, and neither will you. We don’t know what it’s like to be alone as long as he has. No one in here does.”

And didn’t Soran say nearly that exact same thing to him? Icarus truly has no idea - he can’t even wrap his brain around wandering without anything for so long. He doesn’t want to. The thought alone makes him sick; that didn’t stop him from calling him a coward. And now he finds out he’s been saving himself, somehow? Very little makes sense.

“Did you talk to him last night?” he asks. 

“Talk is an interesting word. He was in the chat last night, though. I’d hazard that he’s still alive this morning.”

Icarus scoops his phone off the nightstand. The indicator light is flashing an incessant green, but he turned off all sound for a reason. He just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it last night. The chat is the only thing he has, and the only thing he allows himself to open, even now.

_ emmi changed the chat name to “sisterhood of the idiot supernaturals” _

**trojan:** why is it a sisterhood

**evil landlady:** EMMI

**evil landlady:** Why is my name evil landlady?

_ evil landlady changed the chat name to “ _ _ 2200 Leavenworth” _

_ evil landlady changed their own nickname to Godly landlady _

**trojan:** seriously why

**emmi:** women exist, trojan.

_ soran changed trojan’s nickname to the nightmare before christmas _

**soran:** it’s not like he would know that   
**the nightmare before christmas:** AND YOU WOULD   
**the nightmare before christmas:** also its MAY

**the nightmare before christmas:** how do i change this

**emmi:** you can’t

_ the nightmare before christmas changed their own nickname to trojan _

_ trojan changed soran’s nickname to fuck off _

**emmi:** inventive   
**fuck off** **_:_ ** no

_ trojan changed the chat name to “i hate this place” _

**Tarquin (413):** What’s going on in here?

**emmi:** nothing  
 **Godly landlady:** Nothing!  
 **emmi:** 😉

**Godly landlady:** EMMI

Icarus isn’t sure what to feel, anymore. Part of him wants to smile. Another wonders how many of these people lock themselves in their rooms at night and feign sleep when really they’re stuck in this world instead. Soran, Myra… there has to be more.

“How does he heal himself?” he asks. Icarus is still stuck on it.

“That thing he has. That you have, now. With that in his hands he’s capable of just shy of everything. It’s like the metaphorical genie lamp, except instead of three wishes they’re unlimited. He can manifest just about whatever he wants, so long as it doesn’t wipe him. A material object, a thunderstorm, a healing power that he doesn’t actually have…”

He sort of, almost accidentally, tunes her out. He still halfway hears everything, except it floats out of his other ear just as quick. Icarus is sure he says something - a dumbfounded  _ oh _ seems most likely, but all he can think of is  _ I got rid of it. _

He told him he couldn’t live for an object when that object is literally keeping him alive.

“Fuck me,” he whispers. Myra continues on as if he said nothing, so it obviously wasn’t loud enough.

“I know you don’t get it but it’s not like you’d use it as a weapon, either,” she says. “Some people would, and—”

“I did, though,” he interrupts. She looks at him.

“What?”

“I did use it as a weapon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Myra,” he says, as if her name helps any. “Myra, I got rid of it. Jesus  _ fuck,  _ I got rid of it.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know, in the middle of a fucking field!” he says wildly. “I didn’t know what it was! He never told me, and it just seemed like he was obsessed with it and had no other purpose beyond it, and I was angry, so I…”

“You got rid of it,” she echoes. Her voice is terrifyingly desolate, as empty and wide as the field he threw the thing into.

She sat up sometime in the middle of his tangent, and her eyes on him now are making him wish Soran still had it, if only so he could open a hole in the floor for Icarus to fall through. He’s sure that’s something he could manifest, quite easily in fact. If he can heal himself, bring himself back from the verge of death, that’s nothing.

Part of him has to want to live if he keeps healing himself, one that’s unrecognizable and hidden away. That part, though, has no weight if he can’t actually do anything about it. The next time he hurts himself, that’s it.

And on top of that, Icarus just gave him a legitimate reason to.

“Fuck me,” he repeats into his hands. He has no idea when he buried his face in them in the first place, but it’s saving him from Myra’s look.

It’s not saving him from Soran’s, though. It was such an important thing that for a fleeting moment, he hadn’t actually believed that Icarus would dare to get rid of it.

He wouldn’t have, if he had known.

It’s a truly awful thing, to realize how much you care. If Soran dies - in the next hour, sometime later today, in the coming week, that’s on him. It doesn’t matter if it’s his hands or not.

He trips halfway out of bed. Myra holds out a hand; it’s nowhere close to him, but he stops regardless.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t try with him now. You won’t get anywhere.”

She’s right, but he’s not a proper listener anyway. It’s more than a miracle that Soran didn’t step out into the hall last night and kill him outright. Frankly, that’s what Icarus deserves.

It doesn’t help that half the city must be underwater, by now, or at least close to it. He couldn’t get back to it even if he wanted to. The rain is going to wash it away, and then it’s going to be gone for good, and Soran…

If he could just talk to him, something would change. He’s sure of it.

“I’ll try and talk to him,” Myra continues.

“And you’ll say what?”

“Let you know when I figure it out. Maybe Emmi can try, too. He listens to her sometimes.”

Deep down, he doesn’t think Soran listens to a soul, and never has before in his entire life. If he did, something would be different about the here and now. Whether it’s Myra or Emmi or anyone, even Icarus himself, listening would do him some good.

It would do them all some good, evidently. Icarus never got a shred of outright admittance, not about anything, but was he really  _ listening _ ?

Listening isn’t just absorbing spoken words. It’s about hearing the things people don’t say, the in-between moments that mean more than any words could.

Icarus couldn’t do either.

—

Myra doesn’t let him go upstairs.

That means he stews in the apartment no short of the entire day.

It’s thwarted, somewhat, because Noelani’s brother comes back after school and reclaims his bedroom, which is entirely fair. He just didn’t have to be so aggressive about it. It would be something to see them evenly matched - even Icarus could likely kick him over sideways, if they were.

And then Noelani would kill him, presumably. He makes a home in the living room in silence and allows Topher to kick him out all the same.

He feels like a prisoner watching people come and go, knowing fully well that he’s stuck.

Myra doesn’t tell him about any progress; not if she made any, or if Emmi even tried. Icarus is too scared to ask. Soran hasn’t made an appearance in the chat since the middle of last night - as the hours tick by, he feels more and more nauseous.

“I’m sorry,” he says, when Myra finally returns from the night. She’s been uncharacteristically silent. They all have, save for disgruntled Topher, who may not be able to care less than he currently does.

“Not the person you should be saying that to,” she replies, and leaves it at that. He’s been beaten up enough today. Mostly by himself.

He does the only thing that he can think to do from the couch, and sends him a simple two word message.  _ I’m sorry.  _ It doesn’t feel like enough. Why should Soran even believe him?

He sits with his phone on his chest long into the night, until it’s dark once again and the rain creates odd shadows on the walls. They’ve started to close roads down, ones closer to the bay that are no longer accessible. He wonders if the bus up to Pacifica is still running. All night he waits for a response and all night he stares at a dark screen. For once, everyone is silent.

Dawn breaks. He gets up, before anyone else in the apartment has so much as stirred, and heads upstairs.

At this point he doesn’t have a plan, a course of action. There’s nothing good he can say. Sorry is the gist of it, but nowhere good enough. He thinks, in all of his past lives, he was really good at things like speeches, words, talking his way in and out of things.

There’s no talking his way out of this one. That, or his ability to do it at all didn’t transfer over into this life.

The only one he needs it in, of course.

Icarus stares at the door for a long time, too afraid to even shuffle his feet. There’s a chance that Soran isn’t even awake, or he’s left just to escape them. For all he know, though he dreads the fact, he’s dead and Icarus won’t be talking to anything at all.

He knocks, so hesitant that if Soran  _ is  _ asleep, there’s no chance it woke him up from such a distance. If he heard it, he gives no indication.

He never really thought Soran was going to open the door, anyway.

“I’m sorry, okay?” he says, possibly to a person and perhaps nothing at all. It feels good to say the word aloud regardless, to someone who may actually need them. “I’m sorry. I know you may not care, but I am.”

It’s too little, too late. Isn’t that what people always say? He dealt the damage out. He did what Myra said he wouldn’t do and used it as an extremely effective weapon.

She thought too highly of him, considering she doesn’t really know him at all. No one here does. The truth is he’s capable of awful, terrible things the same way the rest of them are, except with him they have no way to see it coming. Even he doesn’t. Icarus doesn’t know who he was before this, if he was just as terrible as is he now. Was he always meant to turn out this way?

He didn’t mean to be so cruel.

“This whole city is going to collapse into the Pacific if you don’t stop,” he says, leaning into the doorframe for support. It’s the only thing solid enough to keep him standing - he’s not strong enough on his own.

Icarus searches desperately for any sign of life he can get; an intake of breath on the other side of the door, the creak of the floor, the chain rattling as Soran contemplates whether or not to kill him for the umpteenth time.

He would no longer blame him if that was the option that got chosen.

“For what it counts, I really hope you’re not dead,” he says. Soran doesn’t care about his opinion or even him.

“I hope so, too,” a voice says behind him. “It would start to smell really bad in here if he was.”

He jolts, ramming his shoulder into the doorframe. “ _ Jesus _ ,” he mutters, rubbing at it.

“Nope, just me.” He glances towards the slightly recognizable figure lurking down the end of the hall, a cheeky smile plastered on their face clearly visible even through the gloom.

“Jay?” he questions.

“The one and only,” he responds. “Sort of.” He continues up until he’s standing by Icarus’ side, looking curiously at the door. For never having met him face to face, this is still almost exactly what he was anticipating a first interaction looking like.

“What were you saying?” he asks.

“Oh, you know, if he died his body would start to go all  _ ick  _ and then it would start to smell. I’ve smelled it before. Not good, dude. And then his body would start to like, leak—”

“Leak?”

“Leak,” Jay confirms. “The fluids and shit. Except it would be sort of funny, actually, because Kidava lives downstairs, and—”

He misses the rest of it. He almost thought, for a second, that he heard something on the other side of the door before it was gone again. Perhaps if Jay annoys him enough, Soran will finally deign to make an appearance and kill him, too. Soran did say he was annoying.

Icarus is grateful for anything right now that’s not entirely gloom and doom.

Besides, he’s distracted now. Soran told him the gist of just about everyone, including Jay, and now he’s stuck wondering what he’s really looking at. If Jay can change appearances like Soran says, come up with a different face as easy as breathing, then is he looking at the real person right now, or just a fabrication? He could be looking at someone else in this building with Jay’s voice attached to it and not even know.

It’s unsettling. Something crawls up his spine at the thought of it, someone so unassuming and evidently carefree capable of so much deception.

He’s close to the only one who’s not. He just lies and never properly gets away with it.

“Why do you think he’s dead, anyway?” Jay asks. Even he seems surprised by the silence they’re getting in response; he must be one of the ones that doesn’t know.

“I don’t,” he sighs. The lie tastes familiar on his tongue, and he regrets it as soon as it settles there.

“Do you want to talk to him?” Jay asks. He leans forward to pound a fist on the door, and Icarus winces despite having made the same sound here not even two days ago. “Hey, dickhead! Come out here! Someone wants to talk to you!”

He does, desperately, but it’s not working. “You can try,” he invites, thoroughly defeated after such a short time, and then eases around him back down the hall. Jay makes no comment on his departure, his fist rhythmically working against the door even as Icarus steps back into the stairwell, just like Soran would make him do. He can’t take the elevator.

Not anymore.

Myra’s awake when he returns, legs crossed underneath her on the couch, eating another bowl of cereal. He really hopes that’s not all she lives on.

She doesn’t ask.

She doesn’t need to.

—

Icarus doesn’t stop there.

He tries again the next day. And the next, and the next. Suddenly, as if no time has passed at all, he’s spending his fifth day in a row outside of Soran’s apartment, not quite begging but getting increasingly closer with every passing day.

He’s getting desperate, if desperate had a larger, more aggressive sibling. He’s not exactly sure what desperate men are supposed to do because he has no clear memory of being it.

At least not this bad, anyway.

Yesterday he resorted to sitting here for the better part of an hour, until the floor had started to hurt and his lower back grew sore from the wall. He hadn’t said much, and whatever he had was the same as it had been the past - I’m sorry, just let someone know that you haven’t dropped dead of your own volition, talk to me, maybe? If you want?

It was evident that Soran did not want that, if he wanted anything. Icarus didn’t know because he wouldn’t talk to him.

The rain had faded off yesterday, too, just over the halfway point of his hour in the hall. It hadn’t stopped, but the brief lull to the point where it sounded like it had was terrifying. If it stopped, did that mean he was dead? At this point, Icarus would rather the city fall into the sea.

And why would he rather that? He didn’t know.

Today’s been different, for a number of reasons. The rain is faint - hardly audible, but he watches drops roll down the window at the end of the hall. Everything is cold, even the floor. He’s already gotten what he’s needed to say out; more of the same. More things that did nothing.

There’s been other commotion, namely from across the hall. He couldn’t usually hear voices, an impressive feat for an apartment that had five people living in it. On this day the voices were louder than usual, rising and falling as aggressively as he’s sure the waves coming up the bay would be, by now. If they hadn’t already broken through, that is.

Someone over there is getting into it. He knows, from Soran, that it has to be Percy and Mal, and even he can guess why.

He’s almost decided to get to his feet and return downstairs when the door across the hall clicks open, almost silently, and someone slips into the hall. He looks up at them as much as they look up at him as they shuffle down towards him and then sit down likewise, across the way. Their feet are nearly touching as they begin to awkwardly stretch their legs out.

“Sounds like Fight Club over there,” he comments. “Jupiter, right?”

They nod. A small smile graces their face, a stark contrast to the utter defeat on their face. An emotion Icarus knows well. 

Icarus leaves them be, for a moment. It’s only a matter of time until his curiosity is insatiable and he has to ask, but they lean their head back against the wall and close their eyes. The sigh they let out through their teeth is quiet, but there.

“Usually I can make them stop, but sometimes they just don’t listen,” they murmur, a minute or two later. “Sort of hard to make anyone listen to you when you have no manpower to back it up.”

Did Jupiter just jump into his mind, briefly? That’s what it feels like. They’re sharing the same thoughts and feelings towards wildly different situations.

“How often does it get this bad?” he asks.

“It’s getting better, I think,” they respond. “Usually Emmi can make them stop, if Mal won’t listen to me.”

And to think Mal, something older and darker and more powerful, listens to someone lesser. With only one fully intact limb, to boot.

Icarus isn’t about to bring that up, though. Jupiter’s issues aren’t his to pry into.

Learned that the hard way, didn’t he?

“Is it always about Nic?” he asks. The tether holding onto his curiosity has finally snapped. If the floodgates can’t hold anything back outside, they have no hope on holding onto what’s he’s got inside of him right now.

Jupiter shrugs. “Most of the time. Everything would be better if we just… knew.”

“Even if he’s dead?”

“At least then we’d know. Move on, maybe.”

Is there moving on from that? Right now it’s just up to their imagination to come up with what could have happened to him, and whilst the imagination can be a terribly cruel thing isn’t reality sometimes worse? Icarus can see it already. They’re going to harbor hope, and in return they’ll find his decimated, long-dead corpse, almost unrecognizable. He feels bad, and he doesn’t even know the guy. How are they supposed to cope?

Sometimes not knowing is better.

“And there’s been nothing?” he asks. “No leads?”

“There might be, if the police cared. But no one cares when it’s one of us.”

“But he’s human.”

“He is. But they came here after we reported it, they saw the company he was keeping, and that was the end of that. They looked. Or at least they pretended to. But they never got anywhere. They probably think one of us killed him and they just entertained us for a few days.”

Icarus has never had to think of these things in terms of  _ us _ . He’s never felt like a part of an  _ us  _ until today. Icarus is as close to human as he can possibly get; the one thing that made him distinctly not is gone.

So are him and Nic the same now, then? Is he keeping the wrong company?

Is he  _ asking for it _ ?

That’s not how this works, no matter how the government thinks.

But apparently they can’t trust the government.

“We’ll find him one day,” he promises. It apparently is an  _ us  _ thing. Sue him - he’s invested, now. And if he can’t get through to Soran, then he needs something else to focus on. He’ll waste away in this hall, leaning back up against the door like anything’s going to change.

He still wants it to change. He may not have the power to do much else, but can’t he at least do that?

“You don’t have to do anything,” Jupiter says, and they’re right. He doesn’t  _ have  _ to do anything.

He wants to, though. Icarus has fucked up enough in his short time here.

There has to be a breakthrough at some point.

—

On the sixth day, Icarus doesn’t go downstairs.

It involves a lot of convincing on his own part not to get up and at least try. How much more can he try whilst also handling a complete lack of success, he’s not sure, but he’s at the end of the metaphorical rope.

His efforts aren’t good enough. Until he comes up with a better one, it’s best to see if a bit of distance works.

No fluid has started to leak into Kidava’s apartment just yet. Icarus figures he still has time.

Instead, on the sixth day, Icarus borrows Jahaira’s laptop and starts fitting the pieces together that were missing from the story. No one person could be responsible for telling him  _ everything _ , so he would figure it out himself. Even they didn’t know everything.

The only issue is, as he discovers quite quickly, is that Jupiter was right. There’s almost nothing at all specifically pertaining to him - with thousands of missing persons since last year alone, he’s not exactly  _ surprised _ , but the amount telegraphed and geared towards the ones who just happen to be human is not a number purely by coincidence.

No one really wants to save them, or even the people associated with them.

Noelani comes to help, a bit, but she’s in and out of the picture and can’t offer up much more information than what he already knows. Something happened to him, that’s for sure. He didn’t just pack up and leave, too afraid to rip off the bandaid. If Icarus is being realistic, he’s dead. With realism comes the delusion not to be, though. Someone has to be hopeful.

He’s always been bad at hopeful. He’s not the optimistic type.

He’s finally successfully interrupted by the appearance of someone else that Noelani invites in, and though he’s mostly ignored save for a brief introduction to their new token human, Tarquin, it’s hard to focus with an unfamiliar presence around.

It doesn’t help that he has a lot of questions. Soran told him that Tarquin’s not meant to know anything, but Icarus isn’t so convinced. Tarquin has a specific look in his eyes, nothing too telling, but something watchful. He’s observant.

And most of all, he’s not stupid. Icarus thinks you’d have to be to not know  _ anything. _

Noelani leans over his shoulders, eyes skimming over the article he’s landed on most recently. “We’re going out for dinner. Want to come with?”

It was nothing important, then. She would have told him if it was. “I’m good, thanks.” He’ll just ransack their fridge some more and then pretend he didn’t do it.

“Alright. I’ll be back in a few.”

Icarus knows full well she departs, possibly and predictably for the bathroom, but isn’t aware that Tarquin is even still there until he sits on the armrest at the opposite end of the couch, carefully toeing the floor. He’s nearly silent.

He should say something. The silence is too thick.

“Are you moving in?” Tarquin asks. Apparently he thought so, too.

“Haven’t decided yet.”

He nods. Icarus watches it, and then allows himself to look back at the computer screen once again. Is that it, then?

“It’s nice of you to help with Nic, then,” Tarquin says. “I’m sure Jupiter appreciates it.”

Okay, he’s seriously  _ not  _ dumb. Either he looked over here, Noelani mentioned it in passing conversation when he was out of his mind on Google articles, or he just happened to guess.

The scale of information in which he could know is vast and terrifying. Icarus isn’t sure what’s safe to say and what is it. He knows about Nic, but have they been trying to spare him the worst of it because he’s their only human, now?

“Is something wrong?” Tarquin asks.

“Is this not wrong?”

“I meant with you,” he says, but forces a smile at Icarus’ bewildered look. “Sorry. You just look… not right.”

What does Tarquin know of what he does and does not look like? Does Icarus suddenly look so pathetic that even a virtual stranger knows it?

He can see rock bottom, now. He really, really hates it.

Icarus decides against smashing his head into the laptop and breaking both in one fell swoop. “Just practicing my job of being a massive fuck-up and inconvenience to everyone around me.”

“And how’s that going so far?”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” he mutters. Couldn’t be going better, really.

“I’m sure whatever it is, it’s not that bad,” Tarquin decides. “Or at least it’s not as bad as you’re imagining.”

“It’s bad.”

“Have you tried fixing it?”

“I,” he starts, but the rest fails him. He has. Maybe his efforts haven’t been… stellar, but he’s tried, if trying is consistent with sitting outside of Soran’s door with empty words and apologies that he likely doesn’t want to hear. “I’ve tried.”

“Everything?”

No. That part he definitely hasn’t followed through with. His most promising option is an hour away from here, at least, hidden in the pouring rain. If it’s even still there. He was only hoping that the breakthrough would happen some other way, but it’s been a week. Is the chance of a breakthrough even still possible?

“In the very least, I can tell you regret it,” Tarquin says. “That counts for more than you’d think. So just keep trying. It’ll work out eventually.”

The only way it works out is if he goes and gets it.

Which means, apparently, that he is.

Great.

It’s nearing dark, now, and he can’t go stumbling around half-blind like he did previously, but maybe the seventh day is his big one. It could be the one he was waiting for all along.

“Sorry,” Noelani interrupts, striding into the living room. “We can go.”

Tarquin hops to his feet. Icarus waits for him to head to the door while Noelani swings her purse over her shoulder, keys rattling incessantly, but he pauses.

It feels a lot like he braces himself.

“You know, regret is a very normal, human emotion,” Tarquin says. “It’s not a bad thing to feel. Even for something that’s not.”

It takes him a second. Noelani hasn’t heard, clearly, and gives no indication that she was paying attention at all, waiting for Tarquin at the door. There’s nothing for her to think because in her mind there’s no possibility of anything out of place happening.

Tarquin, he thinks, may just be the smartest person of them all in this place, and everyone else is all the more dumb for not being able to realize it.

He knows more than he’s meant to. Then again, so does Icarus.

He knows how to fix this.

—

In the end, Icarus ends up waiting half the day for someone to get back.

The buses aren’t running. The cab companies have stopped service. No one else in here knows him well enough.

It’s Myra that he ends up seeing first. She hands him her car keys with more than a little bit of reluctance, but doesn’t question it. All she does is tell him not to drown out there. It’s a shame, really. He’s awfully good at drowning.

The parking lot behind the building is almost entirely underwater. The sides of the streets aren’t even visible. Icarus is drenched by the time he locks himself safely in Myra’s car, and from the inside it sounds like he’s being buffeted by a thousand drums all around him, playing at once.

It’s harder to find this time even with looking up the vague location. The streets are a mess; hardly anyone is out, but there are barricades blocking off certain parts of the city. It takes longer than it should ever have to to get out of the city, even with no traffic, and then it’s just the wide open highway in front of him. Not many people are braving it save for him, and he doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. It could already be gone, but if it’s not, then chances are his time is running out.

The road up through the greenhouses has two newly formed rivers running down each side of it, and despite parking as close as he can to the start of the trail he still steps out of the car into water that’s nearly up to his ankles. If he had the energy to be disgruntled, he would be so.

He has just enough of it, though. He’s going up the trail, he’s going to pick through the hellishly drenched grass that he threw the damn thing into, find it, and then go home.

Home. Is it home?

It could be.

The trail is worse, now. With every step he slides and threatens to tip over. At least this time he can see properly, though his disorientation makes him question every little thing he sees - what crop of trees it could have been, where he swerved off the trail into the grass.

It’s longer than what he thought he journeyed in the first place, but finally he spots the next ridge and the familiar cluster of trees off to the side of it. He doesn’t remember exactly how far off he got, but takes a few steps into the slippery grass and pauses, raising his arm. It shields some of the rain, but not nearly enough. In reality, it gives him just enough grasp on how hard he must have thrown it, and hopefully whereabouts it would have landed.

It seems much more daunting when you actually look at it.

That doesn’t stop him, though. He picks his spot a little ways down the hill from the trail, walks five feet from it in either direction, and then takes a step further down and does it again. All the way horizontally towards any space where such a small stone could have made it. The grass is long, swaying and bowing under the weight of the droplets attempting to hold each individual blade down, but the ground below it is surprisingly clear, if not unbelievably muddy. Something so stark will stand out. It has to.

He’s halfway down the hill and shivering like he’s never going to stop when he  _ hears  _ it, the odd, sweeping motion of the long grass further into the trees. He’s almost fully under them, a pretense that the rain has stopped presenting itself.

A crack, like a tree branch splitting in two. The ground is wide open, nowhere to hide. In an odd sense, it’s very beautiful now that he can see it all.

But there’s one thing he can’t see. Two, really.

What’s more concerning is what’s out there.

Something is.

He felt it that night, too, like a shiver up the spine. Something lives in here; it saw him then, and it sees him now. He slides his foot through the grass again, hardly moving. Nothing in front of him. He’s completed another five feet.

He’s not sure what’s worse: not being able to see it, or if he had the knowledge of what it is. Didn’t he say it himself? Sometimes not knowing is better?

Whatever it is, regardless, he’d like to see it coming if it’s going to. What he  _ does  _ see, instead, is a glimmer in the grass right at the base of a tree, as if it bounced off and hit the ground. It’s too much to hope. He keeps his eyes focused forward as he slides his foot down, and then the other. Two feet to his left, about three or four down. He’s so close.

When he’s a foot away Icarus throws himself at the base of the tree, sliding into the mud and overtop of his prize. There’s no sense of relief as his fingers fumble through the mud and close around it - there’s a sound like a wounded animal, a scream that echoes off the trees all-around him and overhead, too. More branches crack.

It’s not as if he wants to absorb into the tree he’s leaning against, or anything, but he wouldn’t mind it per say. It’s a better fate than whatever’s out there.

He closes his fingers around the stone tucked inside, until the rough edges threaten to break his skin. He’s got it, but he also doesn’t think it’s safe to move.

Predictably, almost, his first hysterical thought is  _ call Soran. _

Soran will come because he wants it back. He won’t care otherwise. But if he comes, then Icarus might have a way out of this.

He inches his phone out of his pocket, hardly moving. He doesn’t dare to lift it any higher than his lap. The rain beats down on them both as he scrolls through for his number, and then presses call. He watches it go, hardly breathing.  _ Pick up _ , he thinks.  _ Pick up pick up pick up please be alive just pick up. _

It goes to voicemail. Icarus clamps down on every vile swear word that comes to mind; he doesn’t think whatever’s out here in the woods with him would like being sworn at it.

He finds the chat, instead. The water is making it impossible to even tell when he was last online. For all Icarus knows, he’s going to plead to a dead man to come and get him. Get his thing.

Whatever matters more. 

_ Pick up your fucking phone _ , he sends.  _ I have your stupid thing. I got it back. _

Calling it stupid isn’t going to help his case. Not that his case has been helped any recently.

Yet another branch cracks. This time it’s several, smaller pops. A shower of leaves rain down on him.

Icarus, unwisely so, looks up, and something three times his size is clinging to the branches directly over his head, looking right at him. Trying to, anyway. It looks blind. It’s eyes are huge and bulbous, too big for its misshapen face and skinny limbs, milky white and fogged over. It’s too big to be up there. It shouldn’t be able to hold onto such fragile things.

And it doesn’t really matter if it’s blind, considering it’s already found him.

There’s one ugly moment where he’s delusional enough to think that it’s not going to do anything. He sees teeth, as if it smiles at him, and they stretch over half the length of its face.

They’re still not as long as the talons protruding from it’s skinny front arms, though, as they reach down for him.

There’s not any time for a foolish, hysterical thought. He doesn’t get any.

The talons clamp down around his shoulders, lightning fast. Blood spills down his front from both sides. It yanks him into the air in one clean swoop, as if he weighs nothing at all. The phone tumbles away. For some reason, his fingers stay clamped around the stone as if it’s the most important thing in the world. A minute ago it might have been.

It’s not anymore, and he still doesn’t let go of it.

Rather, the thing lets go of  _ him _ . He’s maybe twenty feet up into the tree with it when it lets go, and he tumbles head over heels twice before he slams into the ground. He’s not sure if more branches crack, or if it’s something inside him. All he knows is that his head connects too hard, and by the time he can see again it’s just in time for the ground to shake, violently.

He blinks. His vision is half gone. The thing is right in front of him, and it’s even uglier now that he can see it dead on. All the wrong limbs and joints are sticking out too far, distended, but despite its disadvantages it's faster than anything he thinks he’s seen before. Teeth close around his ankle before he even knows what’s happening, further and further into his skin until he’s screaming and he can practically hear the scraping of his bones.

And then it’s dragging him. He doesn’t know where and doesn’t want to know, either. It’s not going to be anywhere good.

It doesn’t seem wise, but he’s got no other option. He slams his closed fist into its leg, the nearest surface, and just as fast the teeth are gone. From his leg, anyway. When it rounds on him blood drips out of its mouth, his own, and splatters all over his shirt.

It looks like it wants to gouge his eyes out. It’s that thought that has him throwing his arm over his face a second before it leaps on top of him. There are the teeth, again. They’re in his arm, as if trying to wrench the thing away to get to his face.

The worst part, somehow, is that’s not all. The thing is all he can see, until blood from his own arm splashes all over his face as it shreds his skin apart, his veins, all the way down to the bone again. It’s other arm is pressing down into Icarus’ stomach underneath his ribcage. Something definitely cracks that time and the talons press in until skin breaks, digging around in his stomach as if searching for buried treasure. The sharpest ends are curling around what’s inside there. If he knew, properly, maybe he would know what he was about to lose.

Icarus isn’t even sure what happens. It’s teeth are still tearing at his already mutilated arm, but it hefts him up again, until nothing but his feet are left to toe at the earth, and then it throws him again.

It’s uphill, this time. It’s a tremendous throw. He connects with a tree before the ground and crumples to the base of it. Just before it let go, some of his intestines came out, wrapped almost delicately around a set of talons. He knows it. He  _ felt  _ it.

It screeches again. Icarus can no longer see it. He can’t see much of anything, really. All of his senses have been whittled down to feeling and hearing.

He feels numb. Feels the warmth of his own blood fighting back against the cold of the rain. Feels more of his stomach seep out.

It’s like he can hear voices, again, as if the ones from the apartment have followed him all the way out there. They’re indistinguishable, still.

And he can hear a song, too. Faint. Faraway.

He hears something in his head. A whispered word, struggling to become something he can understand.

_ Phone. _

It’s the same voices. He can still hear the song. The stone is still tucked away in his palm against all odds.

His phone is ringing.

He’s never heard it ring before. It’s one of those generic, repetitive noises that sticks with you, impossible to forget once you’ve heard it even once. The noise is close. The thing down the hill is still moving through the grass, trying to find him again. If he doesn’t move much, it may never.

He tilts his head up until the rain is pattering down over his blood-soaked face, trying to wash some of it from his eyes. He slides his closed fist through the mud until it reaches around the tree and  _ pulls _ , biting down on his tongue until blood fills his mouth. The grass around him hides him from obvious view as he drags himself around the tree, until he rolls nearly over-top of his ringing phone.

His fingers, ruined and bloody and protruding shards of bone, close around the shattered screen.

The time reads 7:47.

The phone stops ringing.

Icarus nearly starts crying as the notification pops up - ONE MISSED CALL: SORAN. He’s alive. If only Icarus was going to be for very much longer.

He eases himself back down into the dirt as flat as he can get, nearly face-down, and drags the phone up to his ear. It’s freezing. Everything is. The mud has already soaked through everything he’s wearing. If he’s cold, he can hardly feel it anywhere below his neck. His shaking fingers are confirmation as he redials the number, but even that he can hardly feel.

He’s in shock. He’s sure of it. Every part of him is throbbing with his own pulse. He’s not even sure if his left leg is still there.

It rings. He prays. He doesn’t even know who he’s praying to. The line finally clicks.

“Are you fucking serious?” Soran asks. He sounds irritated. It’s quite possibly the most beautiful sound Icarus has ever heard in his life. He lets it sink in for a moment, lets the knowledge absorb until he can’t be convinced otherwise.

“Soran,” he says, hardly audible. He can’t move. He can hardly breathe. That thing is going to find him. He’s going to die anyway, but he’d rather it be right here on the cold, hard ground than down that thing’s throat as he’s eaten alive.

“That’s my name.”

“I got it back.”

“Thanks. I can read.”

“Can you?” he asks. Every word tastes like blood. He’s not sure why he’s wasting time on this when he has so little left. Icarus knows what death feels like. He’s felt it creeping in before.

And he feels it now, too.

“I need you to listen to me,” he continues. His time is precious. “I’m in… in Pacifica.”

“You really had to go all the way to fucking Pacifica to get rid of it?”

He ignores that. He has to. “There’s… there’s these greenhouses. And up the road there’s a parking lot, and I went down this trail—”

“What are you even saying right now?”

“You need to come get it.”

“So you steal it, first of all,  _ get rid of it _ , and then you can’t even bring it back to me?”

Oh, how Icarus wishes he could. He wants nothing more than to be able to get up and leave this place of his own volition. It’s just not going to happen.

Soran’s still going on, too. He can barely hear him. He’s not sure why.

“I think I’m dying,” he says, faintly. It’s an odd thing to say aloud.

Soran cuts off. He thinks, for one alarming moment, that he’s lost him. He can’t lift the phone - or his head - to check if the line is still connected. He relies on the sound of his breathing that could be anything, really, in actuality. It could be the wind around him too. There’s no easy way to differentiate the sounds in his mind.

“What are you talking about?” Soran asks, eventually. There’s been a dramatic change in his voice; the pulsating inside his skull is keeping him from fixating on it too deeply.

“I knew there was something else here. It got me this time.”

“I don’t—”

“I’m not sure what happens to my body when I die,” he interrupts. It even hurts to talk. “I guess it probably just disappears. I’ll drop your stupid thing before that happens. Hopefully it’s not too hard to find.”

He’s left a trail of blood all the way after him. If his body really does disappear, Soran is going to find the thing smack dab in the middle of a pool of the stuff, half lost in the mud.

“Where are you?” Soran asks.

“I already told you.”

“Be more specific.”

“Orchards,” he says, dazedly. “There’s a parking lot at the top of the road. And there’s a trail, a sign—”

“What does the sign say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. What does it say?”

There’s another odd little hissing noise in the trees, as if it’s scuttling over the ground looking for him, and he winces. He did look at the sign, at least the first time, but that seems so long ago now.

“Something about a Ridge,” he remembers. “Recreation Area. I went off the trail.”

“Where off the trail?”

He blinks a few times. The rain patters down harder. “In the trees?”

“Fuck’s sake— did you drive a car up there?”

“Why?”

“ _ Did you drive a car up there?” _

“Yes?” he answers, unsure of why it matters. The single word hurts leaving his mouth. Maybe it’s because of all the blood.

There’s a slam, like a door. It can’t possibly be around him, which means he’s hearing it through the phone. Soran is silent, now, but he can hear him moving. He wants to ask what he’s doing, but he doesn’t have the energy.

“I really didn’t want to die,” he whispers. Now that he’s thinking about it, he’s terrified. Is he due for another life after this? Was it always meant to happen whether he wanted to or not? He had a fleeting glance at what he almost had in a home; suddenly it’s gone again. He knows, without hesitation, that he’s going to die. As the shock wears off all of the feeling comes back to his limbs, and with it the pain. It feels like he’s on fire all over again. The burn isn’t enough to stop him from shaking.

“I can heal you when I get there,” Soran says out of the blue.  _ When I get there _ . Is he actually coming?

It sounds like he is. He wants to cry.

“I know,” he responds. Might as well fess up while he’s still able to. “Myra told me. I just don’t think you’ll get here in time."

It’s a terrifying realization to have. It would be worse if he hadn’t already accepted it.

“Myra needs to mind her own fucking business for once,” Soran decides. His voice is decidedly a tad angrier than it was before. If only he knew what the anger was directed at.

“You have to let someone care, you know,” he tells him. “And you should live, too.”

“Don’t think you can start telling me what to do.”

He smiles. It’s familiar. The blood is thick and cloying on his tongue.

“Listen to me, now,” Soran continues. “I’m not going to be able to talk to you, but don’t hang up. I’ll talk to you when I get there.”

He nods, easy agreeance. It doesn’t matter that Soran can’t see it. Soran’s not listening to him, anyway. He doesn’t think he’s going to be here by that time. It’ll take him an hour to get here, at least. He doesn’t have that long.

“Icarus,” he says, flatly. He’s waiting for an answer.

Icarus doesn’t have one.

“Please make it stop raining,” he says, instead. “I’m so cold.”

He’s past cold. He doesn’t know when that happened. His whole body feels frozen, paralyzed, and he still knows that’s not how it works. Soran can’t stop it any more than he can start it right now. Icarus took that away from him.

None of this would have happened if he just hadn’t gotten rid of it. He wouldn’t be so cold. He wouldn’t be dying.

He may have even had something else. A future. A life.

All of it’s fading away, now.


	5. The Consequences Of Your Actions

**Tuesday, June 6th.  
** **Seven days before.**

Soran’s phone starts ringing at 7:42.

The messages come in at 7:43.

He doesn’t look at either for just over two minutes. When he does, it takes him a few seconds, truly, to process them. No matter how many times he reads them it doesn’t seem real.

Something in him dials the number back. It doesn’t feel like he has control over his own hands while it’s happening.

The phone rings and rings and rings. It’s 7:46. By the time it stops, it’s 7:47.

And not thirty seconds later, he’s getting the call again.

There’s a part far down inside that is still deeply, vehemently angry. It doesn’t help that he’s been nurturing it as someone would a grudge, constantly stoking the fire that is his own rage. That part is helplessly over-ridden in no time at all when he thinks of the possibility of getting it back, so he picks up the phone.

“Are you fucking serious?” he asks. It’s not a standard greeting by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s all he’s currently capable of. Icarus should just be grateful he picked up at all.

“Soran.”

“That’s my name.” He already regrets answering the phone. For the past few weeks it feels like he’s been tied on the end of the rope, pulled and jerked around by whoever felt fit to pick up the other end. For a long time, it was Icarus, and he was still doing it now. The temptation to strangle the life out of him came back, renewed.

“I got it back,” Icarus says quietly. He sounds off. Like he’s sick.

Serves him right.

“Thanks. I can read.”

“Can you?” Icarus asks. He’s pushing his luck, this one. Considering how much he’s done it thus far, Soran isn’t necessarily _surprised_ , just shocked by his gall. He’s witnessed Soran’s anger firsthand and been stuck outside a door for a week, now, and he still can’t clamp down on it? If this hasn’t done it, then it’s well and truly decided: Icarus doesn’t have a filter.

“I need you to listen to me,” Icarus says. He’s too busy stewing to stop him right then and there. “I’m in… in Pacifica.”

“You really had to go all the way to fucking Pacifica to get rid of it?” Soran’s driven through there a handful of times, for no real reason. It doesn’t stand out for any reason as a place that’s proper to get rid of something.

It’s nothing important. It’s indistinguishable from everything else he’s seen in his life.

He’s had a lot of time to see things.

“There’s… there’s these greenhouses. And up the road there’s a parking lot, and I went down this trail—”

“What are you even saying right now?” Soran asks, nearing bewildered. That’s a new one that he hasn’t felt in quite some time. It’s almost, dare he say it, refreshing. He’s confused so little these days that being it now is almost exciting.

“You need to come get it.”

“So you steal it, first of all, _get rid of it_ , and then you can’t even bring it back to me?” he asks. “There’s seriously something mentally wrong with you. How rich of you to attack my mentality when clearly you don’t even _have one to begin with_ —”

“I think I’m dying,” Icarus interrupts, whisper-soft. It’s so casual that for a very long moment the words almost pass in one ear and right the other.

And then he hears it. Really, properly hears it.

Dying?

“What are you talking about?” he asks. Something in this conversation just shifted. The soft, almost pained downward turn to Icarus’ voice the whole time he’s been talking to him starts to make sense. That’s not the voice of someone who is making their way back here to try and fix this.

“I knew there was something else here. It got me this time.”

“I don’t—”

“I’m not sure what happens to my body when I die. I guess it probably just disappears. I’ll drop your stupid thing before that happens. Hopefully it’s not too hard to find,” he continues. Does anyone? If he really is reborn, reincarnated, whatever, then does his body even exist after death? Soran meant what he said, about him being different versions of himself. He disappears, and then everyone forgets all about him. Is that really how it goes?

For the first time, he thinks that, and wonders what the hell he’s doing still standing here, dragging his laptop across the counter back towards him. It was already open.

It’s like he saw this coming.

“Where are you?” Soran asks.

“I already told you.”

“Be more specific,” he insists. The information he’s been given so far hasn’t exactly been the most helpful.

“Orchards,” Icarus answers. His voice is already fainter. Hopefully he’s the only one who realizes that. “There’s a parking lot at the top of the road. And there’s a trail, a sign—”

“What does the sign say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. What does it say?” he repeats. He needs to know, and best of all, he needs to keep him talking for now. Talking is good. He never thought he’d say that about Icarus, but things are different right now. He’s dying, apparently, and something is out there apparently intent on murdering him. Soran can’t even begin to imagine what’s out there, in the hills. It could be anything; Icarus probably doesn’t even know.

“Something about a Ridge,” Icarus says quietly. It sounds like he’s struggling. “Recreation Area. I went off the trail.”

Soran types those words, vague as they are, and tries to wait patiently for the results to load. “Where off the trail?”

“In the trees?”

“Fuck’s sake— did you drive a car up there?” It’s crucial information, suddenly. Pacifica isn’t far, per say, but judging by the results he just got it’s an hour’s drive, at least. If Icarus is dying he probably doesn’t have an hour.

It’s down to one option. It’s not his prefered option, in this weather.

“Why?” Icarus asks.

“ _Did you drive a car up there?”_

“Yes?” 

That’s one thing going for him. Soran pulls open the map for Sweeney Ridge, the only semi-reliable answer he seems to have gotten from the internet, and zooms out as far as he can go. He has a few seconds to memorize it. The main trail is long, but if he walked from a parking lot he can’t be far from the highway. Those must be the greenhouses he was talking about, too.

Icarus is silent. It feels awfully like he’s already died, except Soran can still hear him breathing. It’s ragged at best. Whatever’s wrong with him, it’s bad. It’s a visual he doesn’t actually need to know the truth.

He slams the laptop shut. The map is as ingrained as it’s head as it’s ever going to be. He grabs his coat, shoves his feet into a pair of shoes, and doesn’t even bother to lock the door. Icarus is the only person who has been trying to get in day after day with no result whatsoever. If anyone else even bothers, there won’t be anything to find.

“I really didn’t want to die,” Icarus says out of nowhere. He knows that. He’s always known that. Soran continues up the stairs past the fourth floor and plants his hand against the roof access door, allowing himself to pause one last time.

“I can heal you when I get there,” he says. Some insane alien force has taken over his body for him to be saying that. A part of him was always trying to care, and he kept shoving it back down. Not caring was both easier and safer in a life where nothing at all was safe for him.

He would ask himself if caring was worth it, and he had an answer every-time.

The question _do you care_ was infinitely more dangerous, though, when his immediate response was something that correlated with "I'd rather not" rather than an outright "no".

Soran wanted to be able to say no more than he could even comprehend. He may have never wanted anything more in the world.

When he couldn't say _no_ , things got complicated.

Rather, they already were.

And now Icarus was dying for it.

“I know,” Icarus says quietly. “Myra told me. I just don’t think you’ll get here in time.”

If Icarus holds on, he’s going to get there in time. No question about it. All he has to do is get there, get his hands on it, and this is a fixable thing. What Icarus doesn’t know won’t hurt him; right now he needs to focus on keeping oxygen in his lungs and not wonder what Soran’s doing on the other side. It feels like they’re across worlds from each other right now.

“Myra needs to mind her own fucking business for once,” Soran says. He never wanted to be in this fucking situation. He’s not the type of person that was meant to be.

He doesn’t know how to handle this.

“You have to let someone care, you know,” Icarus tells him. “And you should live, too.”

“Don’t think you can start telling me what to do.”

Icarus telling him to live when he’s dying seems more sad than it has any right to.

“Listen to me, now,” Soran continues. “I’m not going to be able to talk to you, but don’t hang up. I’ll talk to you when I get there.”

Icarus doesn’t question why. It’s clear that he doesn’t have the energy; his brain is slowing down at the same rate his heart is, no doubt, if not even faster. It’s a good thing it won’t take him very long at all to get there.

“Icarus,” he says, one last time before he opens the door.

“Please make it stop raining,” Icarus says. His voice is as close to a physical form of heartbreak as you could possibly imagine. “I’m so cold.”

There’s so many things Soran could say. He has plenty of them lined up. All of them fail him in that moment, because he can’t stop it. There’s only one thing he can do, really, and he’s too busy standing here to actually do it. Getting there seemed so much more simple when he was standing downstairs in his apartment simply considering it.

At the heart of it, there are two things in possible completion here. Getting it back, and Icarus possibly living.

So why is he thinking of one more than the other?

He doesn’t know.

He does know. He stops thinking about it and shoulders open the roof access door, shoving his phone down into his pocket. The line is still live.

The rain slams into him like a freight train. It’s less than three seconds before the top half of him is drenched through, and the roof is so deep under it that it’s a miracle the ceilings haven’t started to collapse. He makes a beeline for the very far edge looking over the street and sloshes through the last of the water until he’s standing along the overhang, toes inching off the edge.

It’s not a bad height. Not compared to the many he’s seen before.

It’s the prospect of the sky that really makes you think. He’s not up there very often. When you’re like him, if you’re up there you’re a target. A large one. Easy to hit. It’s not as if someone has never tried before.

Sometimes he can’t help himself. It’s what he is. When you’re made to fly the sky always ends up calling you back.

It’s all his - the wings, the sky, his own life even if he doesn’t always want it. There’s only one other thing out there that he still needs.

Two, even.

He lets himself go off the roof, and it’s easier than it has been in years.

—

Soran doesn’t count the time, because numbers have never been his strong suit.

And, truthfully, he can’t exactly bear to right now.

It’s hard enough getting there without anything else to focus on. The sky never looks as daunting as it is when your feet are planted on solid ground - being up there is like entering another world. When it’s raining, it’s a shade away from impossible. The water threatens to drag you down and send you crashing into the street before you get anywhere close to your destination.

But he does. He thinks, anyway. He’s half blind from the rain and the trees are too impenetrable to see through. If he could risk anything now he would drop straight through the trees, find him as quick as possible, and take back off again.

It doesn’t seem like a risk worth taking.

He lands in the parking lot instead, feet hitting the ground two feet away from Myra’s car. At least he wasn’t lying about driving.

The trail is obvious, the sign even more-so. He pulls his phone out of his pocket as he goes by it. “Icarus,” he tries, but the other end of the line is just filled with more crackling of the rain. The call’s been up for just shy of a half an hour.

If he really was holding on, Icarus should still be alive.

This place is bad, though. He can tell instantly. Call it a by-product of having seen and experienced so much bad in so many hundreds of years that it’s intuition, but he knows. Normal humans would come up here all the time and think nothing of it. The things that live out here might be inclined to leave them alone.

But he’s not human - neither of them technically are. And now they’re intruding.

It’s no wonder that Icarus is dying. His skin is crawling just walking down the path.

There are crops of trees just about everywhere, but he doesn’t expect it to be so obvious. Around the next bend he can see exactly where the grass at the edge of the path has been trampled, pressed down into the mud by a single set of feet. The ones on the path have washed away by now, but these have stayed protected by the few blades that remain hovering overhead.

He’s nearly found him, which means he’s nearly found whatever got to him, too.

Soran doesn’t let that thought halt his progress at all - he heads straight down the hill, until the wet footprints in the mud stop and then veer off. He can see the exact place where they end. There’s blood in their place another foot forward.

He’s not there, but there’s something in the grass fifteen feet down the hill, almost perfectly concealed at the base of a tree. Completely unnatural.

It looks enough like a body for him to chance it.

He knows something is going to happen when he skids down the hill as fast as his feet can take him, but it still doesn’t prepare him for the noise that comes out of the trees somewhere to his left. It’s guttural, animal sounding, a screech that shoots through his chest like a bullet would. He nearly collides with the tree, and grabs onto it to swing himself onto the ground and into the grass. The screeching stops the second he hits the ground.

He’s got a very dead-looking Icarus crowded up against the tree, half-under where he’s crouched. His one glance at the blood and viscera strewn out over the forest floor ends abruptly; there’s another noise behind him and he flattens himself even lower, as low as he can get without squashing him. The phone must have tumbled out of his hand - he’s kneeling on the edge of it, now, and watches the seconds tick by on the phone call as it extends on and on. Useless, now.

The noise again. He doesn’t dare even breathe.

There’s another screech - angrier, this time, and then another noise like a tree about to snap in two. It’s climbing up. He can picture it despite not knowing what it is.

“Icarus,” he tries. Nothing. He slides his hand through the mud until his fingers close around Icarus’ wrist - what’s left of it, anyway. He can barely differentiate between skin and veins and muscle. Everything is so red.

But what he can distinguish is a pulse.

He’s ice cold, though if he was shivering before it’s stopped now. _Please make it stop raining._ One of his hands is open, nails bloody. There’s nothing in his pockets except for Myra’s keys.

His other hand is tattered, skin stripped off in ribbons, but his fingers are locked tight. Soran ends up prying them apart, finding more resistance then he expected, to find the stone nestled in the center of his palm, still trapped there by the pad of his thumb.

There was never a part of him that thought Icarus was lying, but the relief hits him so unexpectedly that it hurts his chest.

Something happens when his fingers touch it, when he allows it to slip back into his own hand. He’s only ever heard stories about losing it. When someone like him found one, it became more important than your own life. If you lost it, it was if a part of yourself went away, sometimes forever.

Until today, he was a puzzle with a piece missing. The piece slips into place. He comes back to life again.

It feels like a bolt of lightning hitting him in the chest, or a dozen all at once. It’s an adrenaline spike like no other, as if it touched his skin again and knew it was back where it belonged. He presses it into his palm, arm trembling all the way down, eyes squeezed shut as if that’s going to ward off the surge.

More energy means more capabilities. It also means he’s going to fall the second it’s gone, and he’s going to fall hard.

It’s not even a decision. He already knew what he was going to do.

“No more,” he says. It listens. It always does.

The rain stops without warning.

When he opens his eyes, Icarus is looking right at him. He can see words trying to form at his bloody lips, see the shudder when he looks up and realizes there’s no rain falling over his face.

“You’re welcome,” he says. Icarus blinks slowly; the realization has yet to hit him, that Soran is here and that he’s still alive.

It’s a big realization to have.

"I'm sorry," Icarus whispers. _I know_ , his brain says back. Icarus's fingers are ice cold around his wrist when they slip forward through the mud to grab at him, nails ragged as if all he's done is try to drag himself further away. They're pressing into the first of the scars directly below the palm of his hand.

"I know," he says aloud, finally. He's only heard him say it two dozen times over the past week, all through a door. Icarus’ eyes flutter closed, but there’s almost a smile playing at the corner of his lips. It’s too much for him to do anything else.

He can still hear the thing moving behind them. It’s given up on its attempt at a silent approach; now that the rain has stopped, all he can hear is the last few droplets pattering to the ground and the trees shaking as it moves through them.

It hasn’t been this silent in days, otherwise.

“I don’t think it can see very well,” Icarus mumbles. He’s let his head slump back to the ground again, though he hasn’t let go. It makes sense. It can tell that they’re here, but if it hasn’t found Icarus in the time he was laying here and neither of them since, it likely _can’t_. Judging by how angry it got when he moved over here, it’s not completely blind.

But it’s one thing in his small, albeit slightly terrifying arsenal.

He’s got everything, now.

“Don’t move,” he says. Not that he thinks Icarus is going to. The chances of him standing when he’s got one working leg are slim. Blind as it may be, that thing is fast. If he’s getting them both out of here in mostly one collective piece it’s not happening while that thing is still alive.

“What are you going to do?”

He shakes his head, and Icarus falls silent. To say he hasn’t exactly figured that out yet is an understatement; all he has are his instincts and the energy thrumming through him like he’s been shocked back to life.

It’s not as if he hasn’t killed things, before, dozens of them over and over. Normally it’s easier when you know what it is.

Icarus lets go of him, fingers slipping back into the mud. He sees another flash of bone when they curl back up. He’s entirely gouged open, clothes soaked through with blood. It’s practically a miracle the blood-loss hasn’t taken him. Soran knows how easily it can happen.

He eases himself back to his feet an inch at a time, keeping the knowledge that he has to make this quick tucked into the back of his mind. The scuttling in the trees stops. He keeps himself pressed against the tree as he rounds it and then quickly darts to the next one. It’s following him. The branches are shaking, closer and closer. He only sees flashes of it as it moves, hidden high up above. If he can see it, he can kill it.

He needs it on the ground. For it to come down here it’s going to need a clean shot at him. It’s blind, not stupid. Nothing that pulls someone apart that badly is _stupid._

It’s a good thing he’s experienced in handling pain.

Soran takes a few steps out into the open, keeping his feet as silent as possible. Closer still it comes - he can see spindly limbs, the torn grooves it’s leaving down each individual bough as it’s talons dig in for purchase and then spring off again.

There are hardly even any photos of these things. Most people who get close enough to take one don’t live to see the end.

It’s nearly right above him, now. He can see the beginnings of it’s misshapen head leaning out of the foliage, head cocked to watch him. It’s eyes are glazed over, as Icarus said, unblinking.

Wendigos are truly terrible things. Wendigos are not supposed to exist in California.

As he’s always known it is, the world is truly going to shit.

It feels a lot like a standoff, him, on the ground, with the energy in his body his only friend, and something up in the trees that could take his head off his shoulders in one brutal, quick movement.

He gives it a look, as if to say _what are you waiting for?_

It launches itself out of the trees towards him. That, apparently.

There’s no attempting to get away, not without how fast it is, but that was never the goal. He takes two neat steps back and swivels, at least, so he’s going to take the brunt of it elsewhere. Claws snag first into his jacket, and then as he dives away from the teeth snapping for his throat into his back. That amount of blood is nothing compared to what he’s already seen today.

They go down together in a heap. The pain is a distant afterthought - it’s still holding onto him, dragging itself forward using the skin on his back, and one if it’s spindly limbs is half trapped under him. He grabs onto it. He just needs to get away from it for a second and then this is all over it.

He wraps his fingers around it and thinks, simply: _break._

It doesn’t just break, though. One of the few joints left in that single limb shatters, exploding as if someone took a hammer to it. When it screams in pain it lets go of him, leaving one set of talons still in his back and the other flailing away, useless.

It’s so much easier then to drag himself away, to pull until the talons pop free from his back. The grass leaves no room for purchase to easily get to his feet, but he doesn’t need to. He’s known what he’s going to do for so long that he doesn’t even have to say anything, this time. The air is practically crackling with visible electricity in the air. It’s stopped raining, but thunder starts up again in the distance renewed.

The lightning strike touches down three feet away from him.

It blinds him so thoroughly he doesn’t see anything happen. His vision is still white even when he opens his eyes, again, and the ground in a circle ten feet around him is completely blackened.

The wendigo is still alive, just barely. It hit dead on. It’s up in flames, screeching, limbs flapping about wildly as if that’s going to help.

It stumbles on, further down the hill. He presses his fingers into the ashen ground, and some of the electricity fades off. It’s spreading the fire, though, catching into the driest remaining parts of the trees. He didn’t even think anything was dry, anymore.

Soran pulls himself back to the closest trees and gets to his feet. The tattered remains of his jacket are starting to stick to the blood dripping down his back.

It’s more an inconvenience than anything else.

Icarus is still exactly where he left him, having listened for what Soran suspects is the first time of his many, many lives.

He’s also extremely dead.

Soran’s not sure how he realizes this, or when he does. It’s a very quick realization unfortunately stuck into the center of a painfully slow moment. He couldn’t tell he was alive before, either, not until he found a pulse.

Somehow, without checking this time, he knows there isn’t one to find anymore.

He said he didn’t know what happened to his body when he died; Icarus had always made that abundantly clear. It was still here, though. For all Soran knew, his heart stopped moments after he left. It could have stopped a few seconds ago.

There’s no telling.

What he does know is that Icarus ended up being right, in a terrible sort of way. There’s no time for this. _Something_ happens to his body. Whatever it is won’t wait over an hour for them to get back to the city to see if someone can fix this.

Something needs to happen here, now, or it won’t happen at all.

“You can fix this, can’t you?” he asks. His life hasn’t been this fragile or quiet in weeks. There’s nothing to hear. Even the voices that have hounded him for hundreds of years since he put this thing in his hand for the first place are dreadfully silent.

The worst part is, he can feel them. They’re back on the end of his conscious, pushing just enough for their presence to be noticeable.

“You’re going to choose now not to say anything?” he continues. “That’s not how this works.”

He has the energy for it. A bold claim, considering he’s never done it before.

And then, the voice. It almost feels like a miracle after not hearing it for so long. _You know you can’t begin to mess with_ —

“If you say ‘life and death’ so help me God,” he starts. He messes with life and death all the time. He’s the best person for the job.

_You know there are consequences. That’s if it even works._

He’s already a living consequence. “So you can do it, then? Do it.”

_The chances of you being strong enough are slim. You may not even make it back._

They’re talking like he’s never dared to push himself over the brink before. Curse this thing in his hand that he’s unable to let go of and the wretched ancient things attached to it, the spirits that have to stay close if you want them to do anything. At this point, he’d rather them go. He may even be able to get rid of them.

And then what? He goes home? Pretends this never happened?

Unlikely.

“I know you can do it,” he says. That’s not the truth. Soran doesn’t what he can and can’t do until they tell him so, and right now they’re telling him there’s a chance. Only a chance.

A chance is enough.

_We can try._

“So try,” he invites. Bringing him back to life is one thing, and fixing him is another. Who knows if they’ll be able to do both without dragging him under and sucking all the energy and life from his own body.

The adrenaline is already gone. That initial spike is already almost faded, the same way the fire in the trees is steadily going out as it finds no purchase in the soaked woods. The moment when something shifts he can feel it in his chest, the way his stomach seems to bottom out. They’re right. He may not even make it back.

It’s not like Soran’s never blacked out in his car before. Most of the time it’s actually his, though. He doesn’t think Myra would take kindly to finding them both bleeding and unconscious in her vehicle because one of them had died and the other was foolish enough to try and bring him back.

There’s nothing about this that isn’t foolish.

He looks down at him again. He doesn’t think there’s another person somewhere out there in this world that would look at this and think it fixable.

But he still hears it. _We can try._ They’ve never tried for something and not succeeded when he’s asked them to. They’re tied to him and him to then.

If these cursed spirits, as he so lovingly calls them, have it their way, they’ll both survive the night.

It’ll just be a very long one.

—

Icarus doesn’t regain a pulse until they’re over halfway back to the city.

By that time, Soran has already lost count of how many times he’s nearly blacked out.

He was used to the feeling. This wasn’t even close to the first time it had happened, but the decline like this was. He hadn’t even been able to make it to the parking lot without feeling like his legs were going to give out.

It was easy to attribute that to the fact that everything was on him. He had to walk himself out of there. He had to get Icarus out of there. He had to drive back to San Francisco with the knowledge that he was fading the entire time.

Nothing had changed when he had gotten in the car. It had taken him looping his fingers in Myra’s keys, pressing until it hurt, to convince him that he wasn’t already faded away entirely. He wasn’t as bad as Icarus, who for a long while still looked as dead as he had when Soran had taken him out of the field, but he was still bad.

His own breed of bad.

It feels like something those spirits had said, at least or twice or maybe a few dozen times. He found trouble, or he made it, and then made it even worse. He had _asked_ for this.

All he’s saying is that it’s a good thing the streets are nearly abandoned. On top of everything, a car accident or a random pedestrian getting unfortunately run over isn’t something he could handle right now. He doesn’t think he’s managed to stay in a single lane for more than a few seconds since he got on the highway.

The sensible thing to do would be go home and grovel. Get someone to help, because he can’t help anymore. Not Icarus, not himself. If he tries to even heal himself right now, his heart is going to fail him.

He doesn’t even know if the damned spirits would try, considering how inclined they are to keep him alive.

Even when he doesn’t want them to.

Soran’s not sensible. He’s never had that word applied to him. His vision is reduced to two tunnels in the city, vision blacked out everywhere else. He sees the apartment. He drives past it. The street is worryingly empty and the sewers are gushing up water when he parks alongside the road just around the corner. It’s the closest drug-store he knows the location to. Soran wouldn’t make it any further than this.

He’s never had to be this person. A normal human, that is, the type that stocks their bathroom cupboards with emergency supplies - band-aids and gauze and first aid kits, everything they need to fix themselves. Soran doesn’t normally need those things.

He really needs those things now. That’s part of it. Now that his adrenaline’s gone the pain is actually registering; it’s nowhere near the worst thing he’s ever felt, but it’s not helping either.

Getting out of the car is a process. He nearly blacks out when he does. He’s sure anyone that’s watching him right now thinks he’s a lunatic, clinging to the side of the car to avoid collapsing. If only they really _looked._ It’s all so much worse than they could ever imagine. His half walk, half stumble across the sidewalk to the entrance proves it.

There’s hardly anyone in the place. A cashier. They’re talking to the only other person he can see, a customer attempting and failing to ring up their own items. The beeps are too loud. Neither of them look at him.

He must be making enough noise to be noticed. Maybe no one cares.

He has no idea where he’s even going; has he even been in here, before? He thinks Emmi might have dragged him in here once, at a time far too late for anyone else to have been awake. She probably just wanted snacks.

It’s unfamiliar, though. The lights are hurting his eyes. He can’t even see straight to read the signs dangling above each aisle.

God, he’s _fucked._ There’s no way he’s getting out of here with anything, so why is he even trying?

He slows down halfway through the first aisle. He’s almost certain he doesn’t even have his wallet, but his hands are too numb to check. One of them is clenching the stone so hard his fist is shaking. Scratch that, all of him is shaking. He’s falling apart by the second as every part of him grows more numb.

No one will try to stop him. That’s the problem with humans; no risk. The cashier won’t step in his path to see if he’s taking anything if it means risking her life. He’s too much of a mess, and she’s far too fragile.

He drops the first box he finds that looks vaguely reassuring, and then drops it. The cashier walks by the aisle. She doesn’t so much as look at him.

Is he invisible? It feels like he is.

Technically speaking he knows where he is. In every other regard he doesn’t. It feels like he’s a thousand miles away from anything that could help him. He’s twisted and manipulated the truth that exists around him to fit his ideology, his own truths. He’s always too far away from help because he doesn’t let himself seek it out.

He lets his fingers rest on the edge of the shelf, unsure of how he’s still leaving trails of water behind. Two people appear down the other end of the aisle - a mother and daughter, presumably. The little girl looks unsteady on her feet, too-big rain boots that hike up nearly all the way to her knees. She, too, is so bright that it nearly hurts his eyes.

Giving himself something else to focus on slows down the moment, at least for the time being. He drags another one of the same boxes to the edge of the shield. One little box of gauze isn’t the key to all of his problems. Nothing is that magical of a fix.

The little girl turns to look at him. She’s the first one. When she shifts around her whole body twists and morphs, like she’s changing shape, and no matter how many times he blinks she doesn’t solidify again. She looks like she’s made out of shadows, or mist, never meant to stay in one place for too long.

She gives a sharp downward tug on her mother’s sleeve; her form goes back to its previous state.

It sounds like it’s raining again. They’re both looking at him now.

He looks down. There’s blood splattered all over the floor, like a bullet went through him. His jacket is soaked through.

What was that Icarus said, about letting someone care? Maybe Icarus is right.

He’ll never say that again.

He backs up two paces, smearing his shoes through the blood splatter on the floor, and rounds the corner. There’s no telling what that woman will do with the information she has.

He fumbles his phone out of his pocket and hits Myra’s number. It matters little that she’s going to beat the shit out of him for this - right now that’s better than what he’s currently got going on.

“Icarus?” she asks upon answering. “Are you ever planning on bringing my car back?”

Soran pulls the phone from his ear. Blinks. The little girl peeks around the corner at him. He’s no longer sure if she’s even real, but heads for the exit anyway. The phone screen is shattered. It’s not his.

“It’s not—”

“Soran?” she asks. “Nice timing. I just spent five minutes knocking on your door, but Mel informed me you took off a while ago. What’s up?”

She’s home, then. That’s good. “I need you to come down the street.”

“Why?”

“Myra.”

“Where?” she questions. That’s better. She never gets anywhere fast with him if she doesn’t give him what she wants.

The door is almost too heavy for him to open. The wind that buffets him when it finally caves in nearly knocks him over.

“Where?” she repeats. It sounds like she might be listening to him. That would be nice.

“The drug-store.”

“Okay. Why?”

Of course she can’t just leave it alone; Myra’s never like that. She wants you to admit things and tell full stories instead of just going with it like a normal person. Maybe he shouldn’t have called her after all.

There are two versions of Myra’s car on the street. Icarus still looks dead in both of them. He runs smack dab into the one that actually exists and nearly bounces back off it into the sidewalk; the fake outlined version drives off with no one behind the wheel.

Myra sighs, deeply. “Is Icarus with you?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of? What the fuck does that mean?”

He rests his head on the side of the car directly above his window and closes his eyes. It’s harder to focus this way, but at least the world stops spinning. Everything swimming in the blackness of his closed eyes is, in the very least, real. If he dares to look up everything shifts and spins again. Everything left in his stomach is going to come up soon.

“Please,” he mumbles into his arm. He’s not even saying it to Myra, at this point. Myra can’t make it stop.

He’s asking whoever can to do it.

“Are you okay?” she asks. She sounds only moderately angry, now. He shakes his head. It doesn’t matter if she can see him or not.

Myra knows the answer.

She doesn’t say anything else, likely because Soran doesn’t really respond. The silence is hopefully enough confirmation in itself. He’s not really listening to the phone anymore, either. If someone wants an answer out of him now, they’re fighting a futile and long-running battle.

He still manages to raise just enough energy to be surprised at how quickly he hears approaching footsteps, and then steady hands lock overtop of his shoulders. It’s not Myra - she would have already shaken him so hard he would have blacked out. That means it has to be Mel. No one else would treat him like he was fine china, even if he almost halfway is right now. She did say she had spoken to him.

He cares too much, this one. Soran’s surprised he doesn’t get daily welfare checks from the guy.

“Jesus,” Myra says, worryingly slow. “Christ. Is he dead?”

Soran lifts his head. Mel’s hands on his shoulders stop from toppling over. He suspected as much - Myra is fixated on what appears to be Icarus’ corpse slumped in her passenger seat.

Soran, standing mostly upright, is not the concern.

“He was,” he says, dazedly. Mel’s hands tighten on his shoulders.

“What?” they ask at the same time.

“He _was_ ,” Soran repeats. Ignoring Mel’s hands on his shoulders he slides into the most pathetic heap of his life, using the car for support until he hits the ground. It’s very cold down here. Mel follows him all the way down.

He tries to look up. The world tilts on his axis again. Myra’s got a hand flattened against the window, disbelieving. Mel is at least looking at him and managing to feign concern. It's never feigned with Mel, though. He's too genuine for his own good.

“He was,” Myra echoes quietly.

“I brought him back,” he informs them. Mel’s eyebrows furrow to the point where his entire face contorts. Soran’s had enough of that today.

“You,” Myra starts. “ _What?”_

“Don’t make me repeat it.”

“I always knew you were a bleeding heart,” Mel says, trying and failing to sound casual. “I knew it.”

“Fuck off.”

“Ah, there he is.” Mel sounds slightly more comforted now that he’s getting sworn at. Apparently Soran needs to swear at him more often.

Myra finally crouches down next to them both. Her eyes are appraising, searching for something that he’s not sure she finds. “I called Noelani,” she says. “She’ll be home soon.” He’s not surprised. Myra knew something was wrong. They both have yet to comment on the state of his back. He’s not even sure they’ve noticed.

It’s not something he can assign blame to when they have so much else to look at.

Behind them, what little he can see between their shoulders, the door to the pharmacy opens. The same woman from before walks out, a bag over each arm. The look she sends their way is worried, but not worried enough to warrant her stopping. In fact, she scuttles away too fast for someone who saw his blood all over the floor and did nothing.

There is no longer a little girl holding her hand. When he glances back into the store he thinks he sees her darting between aisles. She stops. Looks at him.

He blinks, and she’s gone.

“I think he’s in shock,” Mel says plainly.

“I think I’m going _insane,”_ he tries instead. Something in him has gone wrong. Most of the energy has left him entirely, but there’s enough inside keeping him awake, and it’s corrupted. He’s losing it.

Mel tries to pull him away from the car, perhaps even to his feet, but their progress is quickly halted when someone finally notices the blood. He’s not sure who.

“What did you do?” Myra asks, trying to get a better look. She sounds angry again.

“Nothing,” he insists.

“You did _something_.”

“Wendigo,” he says blearily. Mel shoots him a look that would be almost funny, if he had energy to laugh. It’s actually quite hysterical.

“You know those don’t live in California.”

“They do now.”

“Soran—”

“Wendigo,” he repeats, more insistent. Myra looks like she’s about to give into the urge to shake him senseless, finally. He wouldn’t hold it against her. Besides, what could they possibly think? That he did it to himself? Plausible, maybe, but could they blame him for shredding Icarus too?

Someone may have yet to try.

“You can’t fix it yourself?” Myra asks. Less a question and more of an educated guess, he reckons, based on what she’s looking at. He shakes his head, and Mel holds him steady again until he’s stopped. It feels like he could go on spinning forever.

“Okay, let’s go home,” Myra says. “Up you get. Noelani won’t be long. Do we need to do anything…”

She trails off. She’s looking through the window again.

Even Soran doesn’t know. He doesn’t think anything else needs to be done, but he can’t confidently say that. They’re both looking at him like he knows.

He really doesn’t.

“Home,” he says instead. Home sounds good.

Together they get him standing. Now that he’s here, he doesn’t think he would have made it back around the corner to the apartment. Not by himself. He sooner would have crashed the car into the building.

His hand shakes when she pries the keys out of them. She lingers on his other hand, fingers still clenched tight. It’s possible they’re permanently locked in that position.

She always knows.

It’s a lot of maneuverability to get him into a position in the backseat so that he doesn’t immediately fall back out the open door, but Mel climbs in after him and sets him straight. Mostly, anyway. He eyes the window and wonders how much it would hurt if he titled all the way over to it.

“God, what did you to do my fucking car,” Myra mutters under her breath. He stares at Icarus’ pulse jumping out of his wrist. It’s such an obvious thing to watch, now. He’s stopped bleeding. Soran even thinks part of his ruined arm has come back, blood and muscle and skin starting to knit back together.

They’re all staring. It’s hard not to.

But home is coming. Not long, now. A home has never been able to fix anything for him in the past, but right now he’s never heard the prospect of anything better.

He just wants to go home.

—

He makes Mel take Icarus upstairs.

Myra sits with her legs swung out into the parking lot next to him, eyeing him the whole time. Eventually, she knocks her knuckles against his closed fist. If he could, he’d give her the finger.

He doesn’t. The amount of times he nearly slumps over and into her kind of warrants him not doing it.

Mel returns for him, eventually. There's blood all down the front of him. Mel and being covered in blood are not things ever synonymous with one another. It doesn't matter that Icarus has stopped bleeding - it's still getting everywhere. In this place it spreads to everyone. It's like a disease.

Soran knows no matter how long he has after that he won’t remember much, if any, of them actually getting him upstairs. Between the both of them manhandling him he doesn’t actually have to do much, and spends the vast majority of the journey with his eyes closed and his feet only just touching the ground.

It’s impossible to even tell where he is. Every moment of his eyes being open is disorienting and wrong. It looks like the walls are melting into puddles but he can’t see anything behind them save for the skeleton of the building.

His own apartment, too, is moving, but not as severely. Maybe because he actually acutely recognizes the details of it.

He blinks a few times. It doesn’t feel like both of them still have a hold on his arms, but maybe he just doesn’t feel it.

Everything is the exact same as when he left it, untouched. He’s not sure why it wouldn’t be, or if that’s just his brain convincing him that something else must be wrong, too.

Or it’s just him. That’s likely, too.

“I put him in your room,” Mel says. It takes him a minute to even realize who they’re talking about, and why anyone would be in his room in the first place. “If you want—”

“Just put me down,” he manages. He doesn’t care where. What does it matter if it’s out here, or in his bed, or even in someone else’s? They’re headed down many paths towards the exact same result. He’s not staying awake through this much longer.

Mel puts him down on the couch as if he’s depositing a baby, and lingers until he’s sure Soran isn’t going anywhere. He’s not sure either way what they’re doing somewhere behind him or even if he wants to know. Probably talking about what a mess this whole thing is. It could’ve been worse, though. They could both be dead.

Here he goes, talking as if he _wants_ to be alive yet again. Fate always brings him back to this, and yet he continues to wonder why.

_You’ll be okay, little one._

And there the damned spirits go again in his head, talking to him like he’s a child and they’re the parents responsible for him. If that’s the case, they do a shit job. That’s probably why they only resort to name calling out of keeping with someone his age when he occasionally does something more stupid than the things he usually does.

“Shut up,” he responds. The conversation behind him pauses. He really doesn’t care, even when Mel leans over the back of the couch to eyeball him.

The floor a foot away has started to shift in a way that makes him think he’s going to fall through it if he tries to get up and leave, so he stays put.

“I’m going to go wait for Noelani,” Myra informs them. “She should be back soon.”

He can’t stop her. The door shuts behind her a few seconds later. When Mel crouches down before him he fixates on the floor once again, wondering how he could have avoided falling through it so easily.

“You should lie down,” Mel recommends.

“Should I?”

“Do you want to?”

He shrugs. It hurts his back again, but it already hurts enough as is. He’s not sure that anything could make it worse.

_You should._

“Shut up,” he repeats. Mel gives him another curious look. He doesn’t realize he’s being forced to lay down until his head hits the pillow at the end of the couch and stays there, Mel’s hands locked around his shoulders once again.

“Weird spirits again?” he asks.

“Always.”

“Can you ask them a question for me?”

“They can hear you.”

“Got it. Do they like me?”

It would be a crime, he thinks, for someone not to like Mel. If someone out there exists like that, they’re not right in the head. Even he likes Mel, and he doesn’t have the capacity to like very many people these days.

_He’s one of the good ones._

He nods, a bit. He knows that. “What’d they say?” Mel asks.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t leave me hanging, man.”

“You’re good,” he says. It’s an easy enough paraphrase, and what little of Mel he can see through his half-lidded eyes looks satisfied enough with the answer.

Soran didn’t realize how exhausted he was until he was curled on the couch like this, all the energy gone from his body, his back still ripped to tatters. There’s nothing he can do about it except lay here. He’s not used to being completely powerless.

The past few weeks have taught him a lot. Most of it hasn’t been good.

“Just close your eyes,” Mel suggests.

“I’ll be asleep forever.”

“That’s a good thing.”

“I hate it,” he mumbles. “The world could explode around me and I wouldn’t even wake up.”

“ _Good_ ,” Mel says again. “Your body needs it. Besides, you don’t have anything to worry about. You heard Myra, Noelani will be back soon and we’ll fix this. Everything will be good again when you wake up. Whenever that is.”

Nothing is ever just good. His life wasn’t even good before all of this.

He’s so tired, though. He’s so fucking tired.

“Don’t let them stare at me the whole time I’m out,” he says quietly. “They’ll be here a long time.”

“I won’t. I’ll come back and check on you guys until you wake up.”

Because they’re both going to wake up. It doesn’t even seem real. Today couldn’t have possibly have been meant to go down the way it did. Not so brutally, not with all of this bloodshed. Icarus wasn’t meant to go out there. He wasn’t meant to follow him.

They both did, anyway. What does that say about him, about the both of them? That they’re both willing to break if it means fixing something? Everything?

He’s so tired of breaking. He’s so tired in general.

Soran lets his eyes close. It feels too easy, like giving up. It’s something he’s never been able to do until now. 

Mel’s hand closes over his fist, only for a moment. “Just hold onto that,” he murmurs. “You’ll be okay.”

He hopes Mel is right.

For once, he really, really hopes so.


	6. The Day You Try To Live

**Wednesday, June 7th.  
** **Six days before.**

He’s been swimming in darkness for so long it’s as if he’s at the bottom of the ocean.

That must be why the sun is the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes.

The window is open, just an inch or two. A gentle breeze is moving the curtains, streams of sunlight illuminating the dust motes floating about the room. More and more drift over his face. He doesn’t actually feel anything.

He can feel nothing at all. It’s as if his body is suspended in light, warmth running through his veins instead of anything important. He remembers being cold. He’s not cold anymore. There’s the slightly sticky dampness of sweat on his skin, the lift of his shirt sleeve as the breeze drifts back in.

He’s safe. Still. The gauziness of the curtains moves back and forth again.

Nothing comes back to him. Not right away. He’s so content immediately after waking that nothing needs to; he doesn’t require anything else. This is all he’s ever needed and wanted.

It stopped, finally. The cycle broke.

He’s dead, and he’s finally done.

This is what happens when it breaks - when  _ he  _ breaks . He’s never felt such relief in falling apart.

He’s done. He’s looking up, at a ceiling. Everything is warm and okay and right in the world. He’s never felt such a thing before.

The ceiling is familiar only from a singular, quick glance. It was the day his curiosity finally over-rode his self-preservation instincts, but he had ended up living through it anyway. A quick look in, and then gone. That was all he needed.

He’s in Soran’s room.

Icarus finally gets the sense that Soran’s room is not the afterlife.

He can’t bear to look elsewhere. He won’t check. He moves, finally. His hand comes up to his neck. What he had thought he felt before is suddenly blood caked and dried over his hands, his fingers when he finds a pulse in his own throat.

He’s not dead.

Icarus remembers being dead. Rather, dying. The last of the rain slipping off his face and the blood slippery on his stomach as he lost the grip he had on consciousness. He had been digging his nails into it, clinging to whatever light he could see, and he still lost it.

Except he’s here, now. Covered in flaking blood, still in the same clothes he was before, an hour away from where his corpse was lying in the woods.

It feels, anyway, like his throat is closing up, like the structure of his chest is collapsing inwards on his heart. It’s not possible. Anything’s possible. He’s alive once again when he shouldn’t be. Soran had said only that he could fix it; when Icarus was alive, that had seemed like a possibility. He had watched Soran walk away, though. He had thought it a million times over -  _ come back come back come back.  _ And he hadn’t.

Or maybe he had.

The room, and the apartment too, are silent. The sunlight streaming in illuminates the scars on his hand and arm for only a moment until he can no longer see them, faint as they are. There are more on his leg where his pants are ripped to tatters. He’s sure, if he checked, his stomach would match just the same.

The floor creaks uneasily when he stands, legs wobbling slightly. He waits for the door to open, or for someone to speak, but nothing happens. It almost feels like he’s alone.

He can’t be. Can he?

When he looks out the window he notices the sidewalks, dry for the first time in a long time. People are out and about, walking, bags on their arms. There’s not a cloud in the sky. The time reads 9:48.

The next day. It has to be.

Or worse.

The entire apartment is dark save for that lone bedroom window - he steps out into the hall and runs his hand down all the way to the bathroom door, everything so stormy gray that he can hardly see in front of him.

“Soran?” he calls uneasily. He shouldn’t be in here. Soran got him out for a reason.

The main room is slightly less imposing. The curtains are drawn on every window and even to the doors leading out to the fire escape, but the sun is finally stronger than the darkness. It’s still and silent, as if time has stopped.

It’s 9:50.

Soran is on the couch, asleep, curled up so small that Icarus nearly misses him, a blanket pulled up over his shoulders. He’s asleep. On closer inspection, when Icarus allows himself to creep up to him, he looks dead. His chest is rising and falling at the most miniscule of rates, hardly visible. There’s a dark smudge of blood high up on his cheek and nothing else.

“Soran,” he tries again, looking around. There are two pairs of shoes at the door, covered in mud. One of them belongs to him, sort of. The floor is sun-warm through his bloody socks.

Soran has yet to even twitch.

Icarus leans in, as close as he’s willing to get, and gently touches his shoulder. He’s cold. As cold as Icarus feels he was, somewhere out in the woods. Cold as in dying, almost dead.

His rationale is trying to explain that he can’t possibly be dead if he’s still breathing before Icarus’ eyes, but he looks it, and his pulse is so faint and far-between that it takes him a moment to truly feel it. Icarus was dead, and Soran was very much alive, and now it seems somehow that they’ve swapped places all while Icarus was out.

And he wasn’t just out, he was  _ dead _ . You can’t take the knowledge away from him. He knows what it feels like.

_ It’s okay, little one. _

He jolts at the sound of the voice, tightening his hand around Soran’s shoulder to the point where it must hurt, but gets no grand response. He doesn’t get a response at all.

It was silent until now. His heart is thundering so loud once again it’s filling up the soundless space.

The voice helps too.

It’s that same one, he realizes belatedly. The same thing that got him to go looking for the phone when he was in such a bad state that he couldn’t even put two and two together. The same one that he couldn’t quite hear for so many days after he got rid of it.

_ It _ . Where the hell is it? He certainly doesn’t have it anymore.

Soran has to. He stopped the rain. He fixed him. Or at least Icarus thinks he did.

That still doesn’t explain why he’s  _ alive. _

He eases down, slowly, waiting for the voices to come back and scare the living daylights out of him once again. They’re patient with him this time it seems, waiting until he’s situated. His fingers find Soran’s, clenched tight, working away until he can see inside.

And there it is. Covered in blood - Icarus’ blood, he may add, but it’s there.

He waits for Soran to wake up and bite his hand off for even touching him like this, but nothing happens.

_ He’s alright. Don’t worry. _

“What?” he croaks. His throat sort of hurts. Everything does, really. He may even be a tad nauseous just to top it all off.

_ He’ll wake up when he’s ready to. _

“What does that  _ mean?”  _ he asks, already verging on hysteria. Ready? What did he do that made him not ready, and how long has he been like this in the first place? Why is he out here whilst Icarus was in his room? Why is he already more worried than he thought he was capable of?

What happened after he fucking  _ died? _

The door opens sometime in the midst of his almost-nervous breakdown. He misses the noise entirely. It’s only because he sees the door moving, bumping up gently against the opposite wall, that he notices.

He flinches at the sight of someone standing in the doorway, ramming his back into the coffee table. He nearly ends up dragging Soran off the couch in his frantic backpedal.

The person in the doorway stops at the sight of him, crouching on the floor like a lunatic. “Oh,” he says quietly. “You’re awake.”

He’s awake. He really is. Icarus could almost have rationalized this as a dream if he had enough time alone with the thought.

He gets closer, until he’s able to crouch down at the opposite end of the couch away from him, hands held up in a clearly placating motion. Icarus genuinely does feel like something akin to a wild animal in unfamiliar surroundings, unable to make sense of how he ended up here.

“Icarus, right?” he asks. “I’m Mel. We haven’t talked that much yet.”

Yet. They’re doing this now, then. It’s not the greatest introduction he’s ever been a part of in his life. It might even be the worst.

He glances at Soran again. He feels like he needs back-up, here, and isn’t going to get any from his near-lifeless body. As is Soran would back him up at all, after what he’s put them both through. Icarus wouldn’t give himself any favors either.

“How do you feel?” Mel asks. How  _ should  _ he feel? All he can do is gape, uselessly, words forming in his brain but not aloud. He still feels quite nauseous, to boot. Hopefully he has time to warn the guy he just met if that’s about to happen.

He leans off his heels, finally, and sits down on the floor with a thud. After a moment’s hesitation, Mel slides a foot closer and does the same.

“Just take a deep breath,” Mel suggests. This might be what hyperventilation feels like. He’s taking in air but not getting enough of it no matter how hard he tries. That, or his chest really has stopped working properly. Perhaps his earlier prediction was in fact correct.

Mel’s a saint, or a virtue of patience. Neither, really, just a dreamer, or someone who makes the best of them, but there’s a reason for the kindness in his eyes considering Icarus is still a stranger.

Kindness is hard to trust.

“Why are you here?” he asks, finally, feeling ungrateful. He hates the sound of the weakness in his own voice.

“I told him I’d come and check in on you both.”

“You talked to him.”

Mel nods. “When he got you guys back here. He had to get a hold of someone for help, so he called Myra. I just tagged along. I’m glad I did, though.”

“Help with what?” Looking at him now Icarus can hazard a guess, just can’t explain it. He’s always treasured the fact that he’s been able to explain things, in the time when he didn’t know the truth of anything. He prefered it the way he was - living in bliss. At least he got twenty peaceful years. Living in the midst of this isn’t any better.

“He was hurt.” Mel makes a sort of vague gesture with his hands, but Icarus can’t make anything out from his position on the floor. “Not anything… out of this world. For him, anyway. Noelani came up and healed him.”

“He didn’t do it himself?”

Mel shakes his head, silently. Icarus already had an image, before, of what this all looked like if Icarus finally got to a point where he wasn’t willing to keep himself alive, and now he has a real one.

“I’ve never seen him that bad,” Mel says, practically out of the blue. “It took a toll on him worse than I think even he thought it would.”

“What did?” he asks. An answer likely won’t solve his problems, but he needs to know. He’s going to sit right here on the floor forever if he doesn’t.

Mel leans against the table, lowers his chin into his hand, and stares. “You really don’t remember, do you?”

He remembers the pain. The blood. The hysterical thought that he was going to be dragged away and forget all of this, just like he said he would.

The even more hysterical relief when he had opened his eyes and Soran was there.

“I didn’t want to believe it at first,” Mel says. “Noelani said what I wasn’t willing to. You were  _ bad.  _ There was no feasible way you could have survived.”

“Because I didn’t.”

“You didn’t,” Mel agrees. “But he brought you back.”

Icarus lets the words process slowly, as if he’s never heard something so mundane in his life. It helps to soften the blow, somewhat. All of the images are replaced by another - him, dead somewhere in that field, and Soran, bleeding, making the stupidest decision in his life.

And as terrible as the image is, he can see it so clearly.

“That’s not possible,” he murmurs. “That’s not … he wouldn’t—”

“He did.”

“Why?”

Mel shrugs. “Guess you’ll have to ask him when he wakes up.”

“If he ever wakes up,” he insists. The hysteria is coming back once again. It’s as if the voices never spoke to him at all. They can’t be rational. Him hearing things that don’t actually exist means nothing.

“He will,” Mel says. “Just give him time. Whatever he did… it got to him. Badly. Worse than I think anything ever has before.”

Myra said that he could do anything, theoretically, so long as it didn’t completely wipe him. Was this the thing that finally did it? As much as Icarus loathes to admit it, it makes sense. Icarus is alive because of him; it only seems true that he’s the one suffering for it.

His chest hasn’t stopped hurting since he woke up, though. He doesn’t think he’s out of the woods just yet.

“What can I do?” Mel asks gently. Preferably rewind the past week or so, but he doesn’t think Mel’s capable of such things. There’s no one in this building like that. Wherever they reside, Icarus needs to go find them. He wants everything rewritten. He wants his time back so he can do things properly. He has no idea what that even means, but he’d figure it out if that meant he got the privilege of it.

“Just take a deep breath,” Mel reminds him. “I can do anything. Do you need food? I can—”

“Don’t,” he manages. He’s shaking so much no matter how hard he pushes against it nothing will stop.

“Then what?”

“Nothing.” He doesn’t need anything. He wants to scrub his skin raw until the overwhelming, sickly feeling of being dead is far behind him. He wants the blood gone. He wants to get out of this fucking room and Soran’s effectively comatose body.

Mel stands up, slowly. He feels like a mouse about to be squashed underneath the foot of a giant.

“I’m right next door, if you change your mind,” Mel tells him. “Anything, okay? I’m serious. I’ll let everyone know you’re up.”

He nods, if only to prove he’s listening. Up, though. As if he was merely sleeping for just a tad too long and someone had finally remembered to wake him.

Mel hesitates. Icarus closes his eyes, but he can feel it. Nothing in Mel actually feels comfortable leaving him like this, on the floor, halfway into a nervous breakdown over his own fate in the world. At long last, though, he feels him shift away. The door stays open for longer than it should. When it finally clicks shut, he doesn’t dare look for at least a minute.

But Mel is gone. The first thing Icarus does upon realizing that is get up and lock the door with his badly trembling hands.

It’s not his. He has no right to do it. It makes him feel better anyway.

He ends up back in the bathroom once again, a familiar place. It’s almost like a home. More than any other place he’s been recently, anyway. Even though he’s standing upright, blinking at himself in the mirror, he still wonders if he’s dead. He looks it. If he looks close enough, he’s pretty sure bits of his insides are stuck to his shirt.

He wasn’t lying about being nauseous. Everything nearly comes up at the mere thought.

The scars are invisible in the harsh light overhead; they’re practically invisible anyway. He can just barely feel them on his wrist, the skin smoother in places than it ought to be. Icarus can’t quite manage to escape from a constant state of fragile.

It takes longer than expected to peel himself out of his blood-stained clothes, mostly because he delays it. It’s as if he’s afraid his skin is going to come apart again, that everything will fall apart, and this time Soran won’t be able to do anything about it. He’ll die here, alone on the bathroom floor, and until Soran wakes up no one will ever know.

If he wakes up.

He turns the hot water all the way up, until he’s shaking even worse than before. It’s not the impending breakdown. Now it’s the fear, renewed. The feeling of burning. Every drop of it against his skin feels like fire.

It feels like he’s alive.

For a long time, he feels incapable of movement. There’s still blood everywhere. It won’t go away until he makes an effort to get rid of it.

He ends up on the ground, instead, fumbling with the plug until the tub starts to fill and until he gets tempted to stick his head underwater and never come back up for air. That he’s good at. You could say he’s an expert.

The water goes pink, slowly, and then red. So red that he can’t help but wonder if he’s still bleeding.

He may even start crying, at one point. He has no idea what the truth is anymore.

It’s a long while, until the water goes from burning to lukewarm, and then all the way down to positively frigid. Icarus wraps his arms around his knees until his teeth are chattering, until the mere thought of his extremities still existing is almost laughable. He lets the shower-head cover him with spray and over and over again and releases the plug until just enough water is drained out, and then fills it back up. It almost spills over the edge every time. It almost covers his head.

He keeps letting it go. He never stops the spray overhead, and never empties the tub all the way to the bottom

It feels like the rain and the ocean again, all at once.

It’s the worst thing he’s ever felt.

—

The first task he decides on when he finally gets out of the bathroom is dragging every single thing on Soran’s bed out of it.

He can’t fit all of it into one load of laundry. He shoves as much as he can in the washer the first time and leaves every blood-soaked, stained thing left on the floor in front of it.

It might not be fixable, but he has to try.

He pulls out the first load once it’s done, and then shoves it back in and puts it on a cycle that feels more vicious, pressing random buttons until the whole thing is chugging away like a motor about to break.

They finally come out clean. He puts the second load in, prepared to repeat the process.

For a lot of it, he sits in silence on the bare mattress, now stained with nothing but sunlight. He’s still frozen despite it. He doesn’t dare rummage around for more clothes.

He’s taken enough.

It’s finally his own hunger that tempts him out, many hours later, but the refrigerator is as barren as his stomach. He knew Soran hadn’t left much - his suspicions are finally confirmed right.

Icarus waits to put the laundry back in for the second time, and then grabs his keys.

He feels sick again. Grabs his wallet anyway. This time he leaves the stupid stone safely tucked in his hand, where it belongs.

It’s so warm outside it’s jarring, the sun beating down heavily over him. Such a far cry from how they’ve all been living these last few weeks, it’s a true testament to the changing times. Could everything be okay, after this? Could it go back to normal.

They may just, if they even have one. That’s the tricky bit.

Icarus’ feet take him somewhere before his brain does, really, and he ends up outside of that same little hole in the wall restaurant with writing on the outside that he still can’t properly read. He heads inside anyway, edging away from the slight flow of traffic and into the lone seat left open by the window. There’s only half a dozen of them in here anyway.

Even the amount of people that are in here now is too much for him. He’ll wait until it’s lesser.

He’ll wait forever.

There’s no telling what he’s doing here, exactly. There are any number of places he could have gone instead, closer and more comfortable, empty even. No one’s paying him any mind. There isn’t a sense of familiarity. He’s sitting on his hands just to keep them still.

He could hardly handle Mel. He’s not sure what made him think he could handle being out.

None of these people know. They never will. Icarus was dead, not long ago, bleeding out and losing his guts in the middle of a downpour. He can still feel the chill.

He’s wondering if he’s ever going to be warm again.

Someone taps at his shoulder so suddenly in the chaos that he jolts and nearly falls sideways out of the chair, saved only by the window pressed up against his left side. He turns and Yuri is looking at him expectantly. After she finishes looking around, anyway.

He had instinctively looked for her when he walked in, but had seen no glimpse.

“Where is he?” she asks, confused.

He blinks.

“What?” she asks, an easy continuation. He blinks again. She’s a very small, crinkle-eyed old lady. One has never worried him before like she does.

“Have you always been able to—”

“Speak English?” she finishes. “Yes.”

He blinks, yet again. He feels like an owl.

“You never asked,” she reminds him. He didn’t. “And I think he just wanted to mess with you a bit.”

“Of course he did,” he mutters under his breath, settling back into his chair. He can remember the looks the two of them shared, the glances back at him as if they were discussing him. He probably wasn’t even on the conversation board, let alone a member of their current one.

Icarus thinks back to her previous question, a simple one.  _ Where is he? _ Sleeping would be the appropriate response. It’s not a lie.

He can’t make himself say it.

Yuri pats him on the shoulder, giving him an assessing look. It feels an awful lot like his soul is being bored into, and he doesn’t like the feeling one bit.

She turns around without warning, and leaves. He can’t help but stare after her. She moves through the line, still equally as long as it was when he walked in and sat down, with a terrifying amount of ease, as if any of the people aren’t even there.

It’s so quick that he doesn’t expect it whatsoever. Yuri drops a plastic bag in front of him, filled to the brim with things he can’t even begin to guess, and gives him another long look. He doesn’t know what he expects to happen next. If his soul was being examined before, now he feels as if a little piece of it is being taken away and given to someone else that needs it more. He already needs it pretty badly.

“Make him eat when he wakes up,” she requests, and then leaves again.

“What?” he manages, staring at her retreating form. When he wakes up.

There’s no way she knows.

Icarus gets up to follow her, leaving the bag abandoned on the table. She’s already rounded the front counter, and he can’t very well follow her, but his reach allows him to reach over the counter and grab her around the elbow, grinding her to a halt.

Her look is still even, unperturbed. “Do you not think you’ve pushed your luck enough?”

“With who?”

“Perhaps us both,” she says. “You’re still here, after all.”

Not here as in this building, harassing her when he has no right to. Here as in everything around him, the apartment building, in Soran’s space when he wasn’t invited into it. Icarus shoved his luck off the cliff the day he took his wallet.

“You could tell me everything, couldn’t you?” he asks. Everyone, slowly, is looking at them. It’s too small of a space not to.

“I could.”

“He won’t tell me anything himself.”

“Have you asked?” she questions. He has. Icarus has tried, more than once.

Was he not asking the right questions, or was the timing just always off? It was the same way with Yuri. If he had asked, that first time, she would have spoken to him.

But he didn’t.

Yuri said it herself. He’s still  _ here. _

Finally, she shrugs his hand off, and it lands on the counter with a thud, knuckles rapping against the edge over and over again. Without thinking he fumbles a twenty out of the wallet that still doesn’t belong to him, never will, and shoves it into her tip jar. She gives him a very enthusiastic, pleased smile.

It gets worse the longer he looks at it, so he no longer does.

There’s a stranger eyeing his abandoned bag of food when he returns for it, and despite his initial attempt at avoiding people he practically shoves her out of his way in his haste to get out, clutching the bag against his chest.

It’s still warm on the sidewalk, painfully so. When he dares to turn around, Yuri waves at him through the window.

He practically sprints back home, without ever realizing he thought of it as home in the first place.

—

The only issue is, Icarus doesn’t make it quite unscathed.

His feet hit the parking lot. Relief is palpable in his veins. It looks like there’s blood in Myra’s car when he rounds the front end, and he doesn’t let himself dwell on it, doesn’t think of it for what it likely is.

He knows what it is.

“Hey!” a voice calls, somewhere behind him. The voice is vaguely familiar but just as irritating as it has been since his introduction to it - loud, demanding, an almost wild frenzy, and there are footsteps pounding after him.

He almost escapes, but Trojan grabs a fistful of his shirt between his shoulders and yanks him back so hard he nearly falls to the ground at his feet.

Trojan jerks him back a second time, certainly just to prove a point. “ _ So _ ,” Trojan starts. “I heard you kicked the fucking bucket. Is that true?”

“I’m not in the mood for this right now.”

“Sucks,” Trojan informs him. “So? True?”

“You’ve seen enough dead bodies, I’d assume. What do you think?”

“Your assumption is a good one.” Icarus feels like the smallest fish in the ocean about to get eaten by a shark, a grin full of too-sharp teeth to go alongside it. “You look pretty alive to me.”

“There you go,” Icarus tries, hoping vehemently for the end. If Trojan is satisfied, he’ll be let go, free to escape to a safe place. Safer, anyway If not, he’ll get eaten.

Probably, anyway.

“Just because you’re alive now doesn’t mean you were not long ago.”

“Why do you care?” he asks. That’s the one thing that’s mind-boggling to him. Trojan  _ doesn’t  _ care, not like anyone else may, so why is he bothering? Icarus would think he’d consider this a waste of his breath, his time, his life.

“Is it so wrong to want to know?”

“It is when you’re bugging me.”

“Everyone’s presence here bugs me on a twenty-four-seven basis. Get over it.”

“Move?” Icarus suggests. The look he gets in return is even worse than the one Yuri gave him, and definitely more murderous. He takes that and pairs it with what Soran said - Trojan may murder him just for the hell of it, let alone immediately after this conversation.

Yuri was right. He’s constantly pushing his luck in every single way he can.

“I was dead,” he admits, if only to gain some favor in this conversation. “Happy?”

“How was that for you?”

“Incredible,” he says flatly, giving Trojan a look over his shoulder. He’s so focused on getting back to the building that he’s not even facing him anymore. “Any more questions?”

“I could come up with more, if you’d like,” Trojan says. He’s still got such a tight hold on him Icarus fears his shirt would rip before he’d escape. It’s not even his shirt. He sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. He can see it already, how he’s going to stand in this parking lot shadowed by the building until the sun goes down, until Trojan gets bored of him.

He’s stuck in his own head when the footsteps approach, but the  _ crack  _ as Emmi’s open palm connects with the back of Trojan’s head startles him right out of it, and startles Trojan into letting go of him. Icarus braces himself for something else, an equally alarming noise, but Emmi sidles up to him instead and slings her arm over his shoulder, dragging him down closer to her height.

“What’s up, dick?” she asks. Icarus doesn’t exactly know who she’s referring to, so chooses to keep quiet. “Isn’t there a school kid around here who’s lunch money you need to steal?”

Ah, not him, then. Trojan’s eyes have grown exponentially darker, eyeing her like he’s stopped fantasizing about eating Icarus and has moved onto better targets. Sure, she’s smaller than he is, but she did just smack him.

Not that he didn’t deserve it.

“Go berserk on me, if you want,” Emmi offers. “I dare you.”

“You’re not invincible,” Trojan says, though he takes two steps to the side to skirt around them. He bumps against Emmi’s side as he goes, brushing by the stump of her right arm where it ends at the elbow.

Icarus hasn’t asked thus far, and isn’t about to ask now.

“I don’t know what worries me more,” he says thoughtfully, watching Trojan go. “The fact that I’m not scared of you, or the fact that he is.”

“Trojan’s not scared of me. He’s not scared of anything.”

“Everyone’s scared of something.”

“Well, let me know when you find his. He just knows that if he messes with anybody here, Myra will finish him, and she’ll do it a hell of a lot faster than I will.”

Icarus does assume someone turning to stone would in fact be much quicker, and definitely more efficient, than Emmi having to lure him off. Trojan doesn’t look like the type of person you want to  _ lure  _ anywhere.

Emmi releases him and takes a step back, giving him a once over. Her eyes travel from from his feet, toes subconsciously curled into his shoes, and all the way up to the very top of his head. He’s already been flattened under a microscope so many times today, and doesn't enjoy the feeling now anymore than he did earlier.

“What?” he asks finally.

“He really brought you back, huh,” Emmi says plainly. “I am so going to lose this bet.”

“What?” he repeats.

Emmi gives him what feels like a very condescending pat on the arm. “Nothing. Have a good night. Don’t die again.”

She walks off before he can come up with a good response other than  _ I’ll try.  _ If he somehow manages to get killed while locked in Soran’s apartment, then he probably deserves it.

He’s been thinking too much. Thinking too much, and trying not to.

The food’s getting cold. That’s really all he’s concerned about, currently.

Right now, it’s just one thing at a time.

—

He ends up having to abandon the food once he remembers the laundry.

It’s a tough job, rearranging everything and pulling it out, but someone has to do it. Icarus only allowed himself the quickest of glances once he had dropped the food on the counter, just enough to confirm Soran hadn’t moved, not even a fraction of a goddamn inch.

He finishes the laundry. Heats up the foods. Stands in the kitchen, past the island, to eat it, so that he doesn’t get tempted to stare at Soran the entire time he eats.

After that, it’s back to business. He’s got nothing else to do. He just hopes Soran doesn’t mind someone rummaging through his laptop like he suspects Myra would.

Besides, he’s not rummaging. He’s not done his research yet.

Icarus takes his place in the living room’s lone arm chair, pulling his knees up far enough with the laptop perched on them that he can’t see Soran whatsoever, and gets back to work. He’s already exhausted most of his options in the aptly named quest for Nic, but he needs something to do, and his options are already running thin.

It’s hard when there’s so little options. He ends up getting lost in unrelated things most of the time - things he hopes are unrelated, anyway.

And then, almost predictably, Jupiter intervenes.

There’s something along the lines of a sixth sense going on here. Outside of Percy, who he’s never really been involved in conversation with, Jupiter is by far the most involved, and definitely the one most openly appreciative about him doing literally  _ anything. _

It’s just a message though. He expects something long-winded and touching, an easy thing to anticipate from what they’ve so far proved themselves to be.

And yet, it’s just one thing.

**planet jupiter:** you okay?

**icarus:** does the whole building know or something?

**planet jupiter:** pretty much. thin walls.

**icarus:** more like nosy neighbors

**planet jupiter:** that too.

He still hasn’t answered the question. Someone like Jupiter isn’t going to handle a lie well. Them and Mel both. Then again, no one is falling for it. An effort at this point will only dig himself deeper into a hole that too many people will scramble to help him out of, and Icarus isn’t sure he can handle that amount of help clamoring around him.

**icarus:** i’ve been looking up more stuff about nic

It’s the best distraction technique he can come up with. Jupiter starts typing almost immediately, but it disappears just as fast. This continues for several minutes, to the point where he flips back to his research and waits for the notification to pop up.

It does. It’s nearly ten minutes later, at this point.

**planet jupiter:** i just don’t want you to think that all of this stuff is yours to fix. it’s a lot, okay? it’s way too much for one person to handle alone.

If they were just talking about Nic, here, that would be clear as day. Words are chosen for a reason, though, and Jupiter has chosen theirs carefully, crafting them in such a way that it’s not painfully obvious.

They wouldn’t be, if Icarus wasn’t already overthinking everything today.

It’s never going to just be about Nic.

**icarus:** what if i want to?

**planet jupiter:** then you can try. i just don’t want you to think that everything is your job, because it’s not. you’ll burn out if you take on too much.

What everyone doesn’t know, he’s certain, is that he’s already burned up enough. The sun displayed mercy this time. 

Icarus is done burning.

**planet jupiter:** you can’t fix all of this. i wish you could, though.

**icarus:** what if i just want to be around at the end, when it is all fixed?

**planet jupiter:** do you think you’re going to stay?

Icarus finally allows himself to lower the laptop a smiden, getting just enough of a look at the couch that he wonders about the answer, truly, for the first time without being worried about something else. Soran isn’t here to tell him otherwise. If Icarus wants to stay, he can. Maybe not here; he hasn’t worked that out yet. But somewhere.

He wants a home. He wants to be able to call this home without attached repercussions.

**planet jupiter:** it’s not going to be easy if you do.

**icarus:** i never said it would be

**icarus:** i don’t want that, either

In a very terrifying turn of things, Icarus is now realizing he’s always had the easy thing. He died, but he never remembered. He’s lived so many good, long, twenty year runs - truly  _ lived  _ them. There’s something else alive in him, now, deep down where nobody, not even he, has access to. It’s thriving, and it’s pushing back, and it wants this.

It wants the challenge of living something he never has before.

**planet jupiter:** well, if you’re staying, i’ll be happy.

**planet jupiter:** i won’t be the only one.

If that isn’t the most loaded sentence in possibly the history of the universe, then Icarus doesn’t know what is.

**planet jupiter:** don’t stay up all night doing this.

**planet jupiter:** get some rest!

**planet jupiter:** promise?

He’s bad at promises, but this one he can agree with. He’s already tired, as if even his body hasn’t quite caught up with the truth. He sends back an agreeable message, something that he’s sure Jupiter will appreciate, and quits focusing on conversations that will only bring him off track.

It doesn’t help much after that, though. It was only one conversation, but it did the job. After that it’s hard to focus on the nitty-gritty details, on sifting through things to find ones with meaning.

He’d like to find something, to create some change, but maybe his first real day on the job is tomorrow. He chances another glance at Soran - still nothing.

He hopes it’s tomorrow, anyhow.

When he allows himself to call it quits, finally, the sun is leaving them behind anyway and plunging everything into darkness once again. It feels a lot like the dreary uneasiness of the weeks before it, but this time he isn’t so scared. It doesn’t feel so bad.

If any of that has to do with the fact that he crawls back into Soran’s bed then that’s no one’s business but his own, considering no one is awake to see it.

The whole world is quiet. Adjusting. Moving along.

He falls asleep easier than he thought he would.

—

It’s dark, still, when Icarus opens his eyes.

It’s a moment heavy with forgetting where he is, assisted along with a dose of sleep-blindness. There’s a crack of light at the window’s edge, the city’s lights and the lamp-posts in the street desperately trying to assist him in figuring out why he’s awake in the first place.

The floor creaks. He can even pinpoint where the noise comes from, let alone see anything.

Gradually, pieces shift together. A shadow in the doorway forms into a silhouette, an almost ghostly white hand locked around the frame.

Icarus sits up slowly, heart in his throat. “Soran?”

It has to be him. His eyes aren’t to be trusted, and he can hardly see after not even a minute after waking, but there’s no other option. As his eyes continue to adjust Icarus sees him shift on his feet, still tethering himself to the consistent reliability of the wall. He continues trying desperately to make him out properly, hoping for any sign of real recognition beyond them staring at each other in the dark.

After a moment, Soran takes a step back. It’s slow, deliberate. He’s unsteady on his feet.

He ambles back down the hall, out of sight. Icarus hears his footsteps shuffling off.

He launches himself out of bed and nearly trips over, legs tangled in the sheets he’s kicked around his ankles. It’s warm in here, the air sticky. The air in here has never been like this before.

Icarus makes his way into the hall in time for the bathroom door to shut; the light doesn’t so much as flick on. “Soran?” he tries again, pressing himself up against the door. There’s nothing to be heard, nothing to make of it. To say it’s eerie is an understatement.

Finally, after some debate, he hears running water. The door opens not long after and he nearly goes careening in.

They’re very close, then, about as close as he would have anticipated. It’s still too dark for the details to come into quick formation, so he takes his time picking them out. Soran looks up at him, eyes glazed and unfocused. It almost looks as if he’s still asleep. That, or dead on his feet, and only some otherworldly intervention is keeping him walking.

His hands are damp from the sink. The blood on his cheek is gone, but Icarus can finally see the blood that’s seeped into the sides of his shirt from the back, the ripped tatters of it. The aftermath, clearly, of whatever sort of grisly attack on him was launched on him while Icarus was busy being dead.

And here they both are - alive.

Soran raises a hand, and Icarus waits for whatever violence he deserves, the kind he wrought upon himself. It lands on his shoulder, palm flat, fingers not doing anything but resting there. He pushes him back, inch by inch, until there’s just enough room to slip through back down the hall.

Back to the living room, he realizes belatedly.

“Soran,” he says yet again. There are only so many times he can say his name, even less if he’s trying to sound helpful. It’s about as close to pathetically useless as it can currently get.

“How long have I been out?”

Icarus doesn’t mean to flinch, but he wasn’t expecting to get words back. His voice is rough, heavy with sleep and God only knows what else, riddled with confusion. 

He glances at the clock in the kitchen, forcing his eyes to focus. Just shy of four. “About a day and a half?”

Soran nods like that makes sense, and then sits back down on the couch. Icarus already feels like he’s too close but he gets even closer, watching as he slides back down into something almost perfectly resembling his position from before. Icarus would believe it was, if the blanket someone had deposited over him wasn’t now on the floor.

“If you’re going back to sleep, do it in your bed,” he instructs, or at least he tries to. Soran’s eyes close, a perfect indication that he’s being ignored.

Already. It’s like nothing has changed.

“Soran.”

“Don’t,” he mumbles, turning his head into the pillow. Icarus scoops the blanket off the floor and considers smothering him with it for all of one second until he starts to feel bad. Never in his right mind - or not - could Soran look pathetic, but something still looks wrong. Maybe something is, if he’s still tired after all of this.

In fact, if Icarus was a betting man, he’d bet on Soran already being asleep again. He’s relaxed, his breathing deep.

Icarus stands there for an inappropriately long time, staring down at him, and sometime in the middle of it considers smothering  _ himself  _ with the blanket. It’s always the easy way out, with him. All it takes is getting rid of something.

Or maybe he still wants answers.

“Why’d you do it?” he asks under his breath, threading his fingers through the edge of the blanket. It’s the golden question. It’s possibly the only one he needs an answer to.

There’s a sharp tug on the blanket from the other end. Soran’s arm is flopped off the couch now, reaching for it, two fingers looped through the very bottom.

It’s all very predictable, down to his still-closed eyes.

“You said you didn’t want to die,” he responds, muffled into the pillow. Icarus would have to be deaf not to hear him, someone who rightfully should have been asleep. He would have never said it otherwise.

But there’s his answer. Plain, simple, tied down to the desperation he had felt in that moment when he had said the words aloud, convinced he didn’t have much longer. Soran had been listening the whole time - really, properly listening.

He had dragged Icarus back up the cliff he had fallen over the edge of.

Icarus finally gives into the temptation he had been harboring somewhere inside him and pulls the blanket free from Soran’s insistent fingers, stepping forward to drape it back over him instead. There’s nothing else said. Soran curls his arm safely back up to his chest and feigns sleep for as long as Icarus stands hovering above him, letting the blanket ease him back into the warmth of sleep.

Whoever had done it in the first place is gone, now. The job has been left to Icarus, now, and perhaps that’s what Jupiter was trying to warn him about all along.

Of all the jobs to obtain, though, it’s not the worst. Far from it, really.

“Thanks,” he murmurs. Soran is properly asleep now, so he’s convinced, and there’s not so much of a flutter of movement from the couch.

He’s alive. That’s all Icarus wanted.

For now, he’s just grateful that he is. He’ll nail down which one of them he’s referring to at some time or other.

—

Sleep comes in fitful bouts for the rest of the night.

It was along the lines of what Icarus expected, no matter how comfortable Soran’s bed is. The small increments he gets doesn’t do nearly enough, but he has more than enough time to rest now.

During one of his brief waking moments he starts to hear noises, again, further off this time. Someone’s come in to check on them again, or Soran’s up. It’s just after nine. Perhaps the sun finally got to him.

Icarus doesn’t move for a long while. Instead he allows himself to listen. It’s not much, at first, and then footsteps come down the hallway. He braces himself for something that never comes, listening instead to the bathroom door shut once again. The shower turns on a minute later.

He falls asleep again sometime in the middle of it, listening to the hum of the pipes in the walls. It’s nearing ten when he opens his eyes again.

Finally, he gets up.

It’s a chore to proceed down the hallway in silence; it doesn’t come as naturally to him as it does for others. Soran is most definitely up and about - the couch is vacant and he’s standing in the kitchen, back facing. Icarus pauses at the end of the hall, watching. He looks steadier than last night. Freshly showered, too, no blood in sight, dressed in clean clothes. He snuck into his own room to collect them, presumably while Icarus fell asleep once again. Case in point about others finding it easier than he does.

“How long are you going to stand there?” Soran asks out of the blue. Icarus has already lost track of how long he’s been standing there in the first place.

His voice sounds an infinite amount of times better already. “Long enough,” he responds. As long as Soran doesn’t kick him out, realistically.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even turn around. Icarus shuffles his way across to the island and eases himself gently into one of the stools, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Soran continues whatever it is he’s doing - taking inventory, it looks like. Looking through his barren cupboards and fridge until he finds the bag Icarus shoved in there, still half-food.

“Who got this for you?” he asks, finally.

“I did.”

Soran turns around to look at him. Icarus keeps as still as possible, like it’s a rule he has to follow. He looks better, too, not quite like he’s about to fade away. The shadows are gone from his face. He looks actually, properly awake.

When he looks away again, Icarus feels like there was too much left unsaid. So many conversations that could have come from one little thing.

“She scares me,” Icarus continues, desperate for something. Anything.

It’s been too quiet for too long.

“Who?”

“Yuri.”

“She’s a five foot two, seventy-something year old, and you’re scared of her?”

“She’s intimidating!” he insists. Soran starts pulling food out of the bag, and he’s taking out way too much. Maybe he’s famished after going so long without food. Maybe he’s considering that Icarus is going to eat, too.

He’s scared of a lot of things.

“No,” Soran says after a moment. “She’s not.”

“You’re shorter than me, too, and I’m still scared of you.”

Soran gives him a pointed look over his shoulder. The more he thinks about it, the more that sounds like a comment Icarus should have kept to himself.

Then again, that goes for most things.

Icarus watches him sort through the rest of the bag in silence, refusing to question it’s addition to the household. He pulls more than enough of it out, containers and utensils and half a dozen other little things. He grabs two plates.

Icarus is very aware that he’s having a crisis over food, of all things.

He listens to the microwave churn away for a while until he gathers the courage. “How do you feel?” he questions.

Soran shrugs and does little else, but that’s sort of what Icarus expected him to do, and something in the expectedness of it eases the tension in his shoulders. The microwave stops, beeping incessantly. Soran drops the first plate on the counter behind him without looking and pops the second one in. It’s just close enough for Icarus to reach out and grab.

He doesn’t.

“How do  _ you  _ feel?” Soran asks. That’s something he didn’t expect. Soran cares somewhat if he bothered bringing him back at all, but a part of Icarus had expected that to be it. Soran had done his job. He wouldn’t do anything else.

He definitely wouldn’t ask like he is now.

“I’m okay,” he responds.

“You know, you should work on convincing yourself of that before you try to convince other people,” Soran suggests. Icarus nearly raises an argument - it’s there, certainly, and it’s nothing he hasn’t done before.

Eventually, he nods. He reaches forward for the plate and Soran doesn’t try to stop him when he drags it closer. He thinks his eyes might linger on the nearly invisible scarring at his wrist, the only reminder that it’s there at all.

They eat in silence. Soran eventually sits down next to him on the other stool at the island, maybe a foot between them. The compelling urge to say something turns into one that wants him to  _ do  _ something, though he can’t immediately pinpoint out what it is.

By the time he does Soran’s attention is on his phone and whatever messages are pouring in. Icarus can only watch the screen flicker for so long.

“You should probably go tell someone you’re awake,” he urges. “Mel, at least, but probably Myra too. And Noelani. Maybe say thanks?”

Soran nods. They’re both through with starting fights, for now. Perhaps they’ve been through enough, these past few days. They deserve something else.

He doesn’t get invited to tag along and so he doesn’t offer himself a position either, watching Soran move around for a minute until he heads for the door. Even he looks surprised to find Icarus still sitting there, patient and obedient for once.

“Do you want me to leave?” Icarus asks. The answer is already queued up in his head. He can envision exactly how he’s going to go out, with nothing to his name and nothing hidden in his pockets for once.

“If I said yes, would you actually go?” Soran asks. Icarus would, if that’s what he wanted, but considering he didn’t just get an outright answer either way, he’s thinking otherwise. If Soran wanted him gone, he would have said so. There wouldn’t be any nonsense, no confusion, no beating around the bush.

He considers that carefully, but not so much his words. “Probably not,” he offers eventually, holding his breath. That could be the worst thing to say. It could push this over the edge again.

Soran ducks his head, a smile attempting to pull the corners of his mouth up. “Figures,” he says, not enough under his breath to go unheard.

It might be happiness. Icarus is almost hopeful enough to think that it is.

He pauses halfway out the door, turning his head back. Icarus is fully aware that he’s staring, but can’t bring himself to look away.

“I might be gone for a while,” Soran tells him.

“I know. I’ll fend for myself.”

“You’re not very good at that, you know.”

“I’ll survive, this time,” he promises. He allows himself to smile, too. It feels like the first time in a while that it’s been real.

When the door closes, it doesn’t really feel like a seperation.

Not anymore.

—

Being alone for a while is odd, to say the least, but not nearly as uncomfortable as Icarus would have expected.

Even when he’s been alone in the past while it’s always been accompanied by some stress or other, a thought lingering in his head that made him feel unsafe and unwelcome. They were things that, without someone corralling them, could drive you insane.

Being alone and not having a worry, even for just a little while, is a new experience. It turns into a long while, too, a few hours of abnormal quiet that ultimately end up bringing forth the most peace that he thinks anyone is ever going to get allowed.

He’s still here, after all. That alone could be enough.

Soran returns sometime halfway through the evening, the living room cast in odd shades of red and orange, and even then not much is said. Icarus quietly picks himself up off the couch and returns to the chair whilst Soran is in the bathroom, noting the exhaustion that’s returned to his eyes and the heavier drag to each step.

He fights it, for a time. Icarus tries to be discreet about watching him. It’s actually, properly dark by the time he falls asleep, yet again on the couch, and Icarus leaves him be for a while until his own eyelids start to droop, until the edges of the television get fuzzy around the edges.

He thinks about getting him up, too. If Soran reacts he will, no question about it, but Icarus doesn’t even earn a twitch when he settles the blanket over him yet again.

It’s not so much commandeering his room as he doesn’t feel inclined to move him. If Soran is fine where he is, then Icarus is too. Ignoring the fact that it’s getting too easy to slip back into the warmth of a bed, for once, it’s just for everyone’s good.

If Soran would stop terrifying him into waking during the middle of the night, that is.

This time it’s much quieter. Icarus isn’t even sure why he opens his eyes, and this time the silhouette of him has passed the door and has made its way into the center of the room.

“Are you really sleeping in my bed again?” Soran asks, voice still drowsy. Icarus considers getting up and sprinting out, but ultimately decides against it. He does at least sit up, ignoring the fog in his head as he struggles to come back to himself and his surroundings.

“You weren’t using it,” he mumbles, rubbing at his eyes a few times. Soran still looks just as tired, maybe even a bit confused.

He doesn’t say anything else, and there’s a message there that he’s supposed to receive, but Icarus has already decided that apparently he’s returning to his home on the couch again, giving up the warmth of the bed for a reason that’s at least beyond  _ good. _

He eases his feet onto the floor, wincing at the sudden coldness. “Go back to sleep,” he instructs, leaving the space open for Soran to crawl into just as easy.

Soran hasn’t slept in his own bed for nearly three days, now.

And Soran doesn’t move now, either. He’s still when Icarus gets to his feet, looking between the bed and the floor and everything but Icarus’ face. He feels invisible in a room with another person for the first time in his life.

“Go to sleep,” he repeats. He doesn’t want to leave, but he has to.

He’s rapidly discovering and coming to terms with that what he wants doesn’t matter much. It almost doesn’t, at this point.

This is different than any other time, though. Icarus knows his options, and he knows he’s got Soran standing a few inches away from him. Today is an anomaly. When he was dying under those trees, he didn’t think he was even going to have a  _ today. _

And suddenly he does. So maybe, for once what he wants does matter.

It’s so quiet all he can hear is the thumping of his own heart, steady but so, so fast, and Soran’s equally steady breathing. Both terrifying reminders that they’re still alive.

He knows why they’re terrifying.

There’s a part of him that’s still crying out to go, to get out while he still has the chance. It’s not just from this room, either. If he runs now, far far away from all of this, he can escape almost scotch free. He’ll forget about this one day, when he’s living a proper life for once out there somewhere in the world, not worrying about death.

He’s still standing here. His chest hurts.

He knows  _ why. _

“I want,” he starts weakly, but the rest of the words twist up together, until they’re indistinguishable from one another. It’s an easy repeat, a way out:  _ what you want doesn’t matter _ .

Soran doesn’t have to put a stop to this, because one look at him and Icarus stops anyway. “What do you want?” Soran asks.

They both know.

Nothing happens. The quiet stretches on, the darkness of the room grows thicker. Soran’s face is a gentle, blurred outline, softening the blows that come with waking every morning. Another part of him wishes he had died and stayed dead - the first time, the second, any of them. Dying is less complicated than this.

Soran shifts on his feet. He holds his breath. There’s a pause and then a break, as Soran looks at him and then shifts, again, just enough to ease past him. He doesn’t brush against him even for a moment.

Icarus is about to lose this moment. That’s what will happen, if Soran crawls into bed or if he makes the decision to leave. Once it’s gone, there’s no getting it back. Then whatever he wants really doesn’t matter. It has no impact.

He’s already almost out of sight and Icarus is fading, too.

He grabs his arm. Knows he’s holding on too tight. Soran doesn’t stop moving. Sometimes it seems like he’s not meant to, like he’s the storm itself and he’s always growing and shrinking, changing with the day.

It feels like real, tangible electricity hits him. It might as well be.

He pulls Soran back to him, until he can feel him, finally for real, and then kisses him.

It’s everything and almost nothing, all at once.

Once he has him back, they’re both still. Worryingly, nervously still, as if frozen in place. Icarus would think time itself had stopped if his heart hadn’t started up its frantic, irregular rhythm the moment he grabbed him. Most everything fades away except for that and Soran’s hand on his arm. He doesn’t know when it got there.

It’s presence there makes him consider, somewhere in the fog of his brain, that Soran could push him away.

And he’s not.

Icarus feels like he’s finally met a point in his life where he’s irrevocably alive.

He goes to move away at nearly the same second Soran does. They’re both in sync, finally. He opens his eyes. Soran doesn’t. His nails are digging so harshly into Icarus’ arms there are certainly going to be marks when he finally steps away, but he can hardly feel it.

“If that’s what you want,” Soran says slowly, voice slightly hoarse. The sound makes his blood sing a tune he’s never quite heard before. “Then you must really, really hate yourself.”

A smile almost fights its way onto his face. If this is what hating himself feels like, then he’ll do it gladly, over and over again.

He could do this for eternity.

“I do,” he agrees quietly. Soran’s eyes open, finally. He stares at him.

It would be so easy to lean back in.

Icarus carefully let go of his arm. “Night,” he murmurs. A moment later, a heartbeat’s hesitation, and Soran lets go of him, too.

It’s a forcible task, but he steps out into the hallway and closes the door behind him, leaving Soran to his peace for the night. It may not be quite that, though. Icarus sits on the couch and waits for his heartbeat to slow, though it never does, and stares at the marks on his arms until they fade away.

He hardly sleeps a wink.

There’s no way Soran does, either.

—

It turns out Icarus is the coward in this relationship.

Whoever finds it to be a shocker wasn’t paying attention very well.

He pretends to be asleep for so long the next morning that there’s no feasible way Soran believes it. He stops tip-toeing around sometime after ten, but Icarus doesn’t stop there. He still keeps his eyes closed, and even goes so far as to turn his back to the main room when Soran walks off for a moment to make it even easier.

Eventually, he hears movement from the front door, and then it opens and closes. The feeling of another presence disappears. Icarus sticks his head over the back of the couch just in time for the door to pop back up, and Soran’s looking right at him.

So not only is he a coward, but evidently he’s very easily played as well.

Him zero, Soran one. Or maybe he’s in the negatives by now.

“I’m going to get food,” Soran says, after a long ten or fifteen seconds that involves a lot of staring and not much else. Icarus immediately thinks he should offer to go with him, and then can think of nothing worse than being stuck in a car with him, of having to follow him around a goddamn grocery store like everything is perfectly fine.

He’s really fucking done it now. He’s made it so awkward it’s hard to breathe.

“Okay,” he says finally. It’s not good enough, and it doesn’t look like Soran is quite satisfied with it either, but that’s the end of the conversation.

The door closes. Icarus buries his face in the back of the couch and chokes down every scream and curse word that comes to the mind.

Soran goes to more places than a store, or he sits in the parking lot somewhere and just doesn’t move. He’s gone for what feels like forever. Icarus misses him in the oddest sort of way and squashes the thought every time it arises.

There’s no use in thinking about it. Icarus doesn’t even know what’s going to come of it.

If anything at all.

When he finally does return, hours and hours later and bags laden over his arms, Icarus is halfway through trying to scrounge up a semi-decent meal from the barren cupboards. Soran gives a confused look at whatever it is he’s got on the counter, brushes past him, and then sets everything down next to it.

Icarus isn’t even sure if it was the bags or Soran that touched him, but dies a little bit regardless.

He can’t very well stand there, so Icarus pushes his weak attempt at food to the side and starts putting things away. He feels Soran follow him, re-opening cupboards that he’s closed to put things in their proper places, and he tries to take as careful of notes as he can.

For next time, if he realizes. If this happens again, he wants to know where things go. Where they fit.

He could throw up with very little effort right now.

It takes him a long time to gather the courage. “Are we ever going to—”

The bathroom door slams shut. He hadn’t even realized Soran was gone in the first place.

“—talk about this?” he finishes weakly, and nearly bashes his head open on the last remaining cupboard poking out in front of him. It seems like the only appropriate response to something that’s clearly never going to happen.

So they’re not going to talk. Icarus will learn to be okay with that, eventually. He’s not sure how, but he doesn’t have a choice.

That’s just how it is. Even when Soran comes out of the bathroom nothing changes, and by that point Icarus has lost his nerve. He  _ could  _ say something, but he could also curl up into a ball into this chair and fuse together so that he can never do anything stupid again.

It’s late, later than usual when Soran finally gets to his feet. Icarus could have gone to sleep a while ago, but wasn’t going to say anything against it. He blinks a few times when Soran flicks the television off without asking, plunging the room into darkness.

He props his chin up on his knees and keeps it there. Soran will go to bed. He’ll make his move onto the couch and curse his very foolish existence. They’ll repeat it the next day. They’ll repeat it over and over again until one of them is gone.

He blinks. The room becomes more clear.

He blinks again and realizes, belatedly, that Soran is still standing there, and Soran is staring at him.

Everything inside of him seizes up. A hand wraps around his stomach and squeezes so hard he feels his insides turn to absolute mush.

“You don’t have to sleep out here,” Soran says. There’s something wrong with his voice, but Icarus’ heart is so loud in his own ears that he can’t even begin to pinpoint it. There’s another squeeze around what’s left of his stomach. It hurts, this time.

Soran doesn’t say anything else, and doesn’t look at him again either when he heads down the hall. Icarus is on his feet before he’s even really processed it, but Soran’s gone, and he’s left clutching a throw pillow against his chest like a shield, forcing himself to breathe evenly.

Icarus always left the door open whilst he was sleeping in there, but Soran was the opposite. That door was shut, locked tight, a barricade to unwanted visitors and anyone that might dare think of trying to get in.

It’s open, now, just a few inches. That little bit of space feels like an invitation.

They’re not talking, apparently, but this is something. This is more than just  _ something _ , in fact, and he’s not sure his heart will survive the night at the rate it’s going.

He eases down the hall, as silent as he’s ever been. The door creaks when he pushes it open just enough to slip in and he keeps his eyes on the floor until he’s inside, shutting the door tight. He nearly considers locking it, just for good measure.

He can hardly see Soran, tucked away into the side of the bed that Icarus had been sleeping in, back turned to him, facing the window. No wonder he wanted Icarus out of his bed for a minute there - not only was he stealing it in general, but also his preferred space.

Now he stands at the opposite side of the bed and lays his hand over the blanket there, perfectly lined up with the pillow, undisturbed.

“If you’re going to stand there all night, go sleep on the couch,” Soran says. There was no chance Soran was asleep already, but his voice is still alarming. It startles him enough into pulling the corner of the blankets up, not nearly enough space to curl up as someone normally would, but more than enough for him to be as unobtrusive as possible as he lays down.

He’s as close to the edge of the bed as one could physically get. The blankets aren’t even draped all the way over his right side, and his hip is digging uncomfortably into the bed, but he doesn’t dare move. He got in here like this, and now he has to stay like this. There’s no chance he’s going to send the bed creaking or disturb him or do  _ anything  _ at all.

Physically, anyway.

“Soran,” he starts.

“Don’t,” Soran interrupts. “Not right now.”

It’s not an outright no. They can do this in the morning, maybe, or a few days from now. Whenever they’re both ready.

One day they will be.

“Can I ask you a question, then?” Icarus wonders, racking his brain desperately for one. He’s not ready to sleep just yet - he was tired before, but now he’s stunningly awake, and he can’t let go Soran that easily. Not when he’s laying next to him like this.

“Go for it.”

“How long have you been alone, really?”

There’s a long, awful pause. Icarus prepares to get no response, and wouldn’t blame Soran for it if he didn’t.

He sighs, a long and painful one. “What do you want, exactly? Like a number?”

“That works.”

“Six or seven hundred, give or take. But this… something like this… longer.”

Soran knows how long. He knows exactly how long, but he won’t say it. And what is  _ this _ , Icarus wants to ask, but he doesn’t care. That will come with time, time that they both have now.

He tries to settle his head more comfortably into the pillow. It doesn’t work. “Okay,” he murmurs eventually.

“Can I ask you a question?” Soran fires back.

“Sure.”

“How much of my room did you snoop through while I was out?”

“None of it.”

“Bullshit.”

“I didn’t!” he insists wildly. “I swear. I just slept in here and washed the blankets and that was it.”

He chooses not to mention the long, blank hours that he had sat on the bare mattress, brain checked out. Brain in another country, really. Soran doesn’t need to know the ugliest details of that day. He was going through enough.

He eases down a bit more, searching for the amount of comfort he had achieved before. “Why?” he asks, halfway down, sudden suspicion coming to mind. It’s a good way to cover up the noise he’s making as he searches for a good spot, too.

“No reason.”

“Soran.”

“Just wondering if you found anything.”

“Like  _ what _ ?”

“Like the sword under the bed.”

Icarus flounders with a response for a solid minute, managing a series of undignified noises that get him nowhere. He looks down at the sheets underneath him as if something is going to present itself, almost unwilling to understand.

“Is that a metaphor for something?” he asks finally.

Soran, honest to God, snorts. “A fucking metaphor. Jesus Christ. I’m glad this is your first and only night sleeping in here with me.”

“Please don’t kick me out,” he begs, halfway, but Soran is  _ laughing _ , quiet little amused huffs that he relishes more than he ever thought he could.

“Can I see it in the morning?” he asks, unwilling to let it go.

“Now that’s a metaphor.”

He can’t help the little choked laugh that escapes him, and he’s relaxed before he realizes what’s happening. The chill that had eclipsed him in the first place is already gone. He rolls over onto his side, the edges of Soran’s back stark with the faint light from the window.

They’re quiet, again, but Icarus doesn’t let go of the little smile that’s stuck on his face.

“Night,” he murmurs. He so badly wants to reach out for him, in some respect. He knows the type of person he is. He also, somehow, knows just as much that if he goes over there right now he’s going to shatter something.

He thinks Soran says it back, quiet and muffled, but even if he doesn’t, they have time. So much of it that it hurts.

And he’s okay with that, for now.

—

There’s sun again in the morning. Icarus can feel it again even without opening his eyes and allows himself to bask in it. It’s coming in full force through the window - still early, then, but he feels well-rested enough to get up.

He gives himself another minute. He’s shifted away from the edge of the bed. Not too much, but just enough. When he allows his hand to stretch out it’s not long before his fingers come into contact with the warmth of another body. Soran’s closer, too. Still not close enough that either of them is smothering the other.

It’s for the best. All of it.

The sun makes it hard to see when he opens his eyes, not much at all there save for the softened, unguarded edges of Soran’s face as he sleeps. Likely the only times he looks like that, really.

For once he’s not controlling anything. The sun is just  _ out,  _ and life is going on as normally as it can. He doesn’t have to worry about anything now.

Neither of them do.

Icarus knows he could lie there forever, unbothered, but the glint of the stone on the opposite nightstand catches his attention instead.

It being there, as unguarded as he himself is, is an act of trust. Icarus hadn’t noticed it last night. Perhaps Soran only put it there when he was certain he was asleep.

It could have always been there, too.

It’s safe from him, now, that’s for certain, but that doesn’t mean everyone will act the same way. He can’t be the only person to have ever taken it, the only wrongful hands that have held possession of it.

For now, it’s safe, but will it always be?

For their sake, Icarus needs it to be. Both of their lives rely on it now. It’s still early. Soran won’t be up for a bit, and now he’s even more awake than he thought possible.

It’s an idea. Not necessarily a good one, but like he said - he has time. Maybe there’s not enough time in the world, not for this, but he has to do something. If no one else is going to, then it’s his responsibility.

This is his job. This feels like the one he was meant to have.

He can solve this, and he’s going to.

When he gets up and grabs it, he’s never been more sure in his life.


	7. The Next Time The Sky Falls

**Saturday, June 10th.  
** **Three days before.**

Alone is not something Soran expects to be when he wakes up.

But here he is, alone. In his bed. He wasn’t alone last night, and is struck by how odd it is that he’s waking up otherwise. It’s cold everywhere he’s not, lingering on the sheets in every other direction despite the sun spilling over them.

The sun never comes in here this bright. At least it’s fitting that it is now.

Icarus doesn’t strike him as an early riser. Even if he was, today would be the day to stick around. Soran lays an arm out, just in case, but it sinks into the pillow to his right and further creases the slight indent left in the middle.

He’s definitely gone.

Soran rolls over the other way and fumbles for his phone on the nightstand. It reads a few minutes past nine, which is longer than he usually makes it unless he’s feeling particularly sorry for himself.

Of all the possibilities, it’s not that particular thing that ends up being the oddest amount of time.

It’s how long it takes him to realize.

He’s unguarded, he knows, senses dull from sleep and still getting accustomed to the sudden light. It hadn’t even been a thought in his mind. Soran had a vision of what he was going to wake up to this morning, and suddenly he’s getting none of it.

Icarus is gone, and the spot where he left it last night is empty, too.

He’s going to kill him, properly, for real this time. He’s not getting brought back.

Soran’s on his feet too fast, sending the world spinning. He finally squashes the innate, insane urge to call him by doing just that, as if it’s going to matter. That’s what people do in a normal circumstance: they call.

Nothing about this is normal. It’s just Soran, continuing to make mistake after mistake, and Icarus proving that he apparently just can’t keep his hands to himself.

The phone rings and rings and rings as he steps out into the hallway, the equally empty living room. Second to everything, he notices his wallet is missing from the counter. He didn’t even check, but somehow he knows that Icarus’ phone is gone, too.

The voicemail finally chimes. He doesn’t even have a message set up - it’s just a long, delayed beep, and it sends a very ugly feeling crawling up his spine.

“I don’t think you understand,” he says slowly. “That when I find you, I am going to take your intestines out and use them to hang you from the fire escape.”

It’s a threat he couldn’t have imagined making last night, when he was at war with himself for what to do. He didn’t imagine making a threat at all.

And yet here they are. It’s back to their first day all over again.

Suddenly he’s out in the hall, no socks, let alone shoes, and rapidly discovering that very few people in this building actually have any sense. Considering someone from here has already gone missing, he’s both surprised and deeply disturbed that so many of them have so little common sense.

The door down the hall is open when he tries it. Mel is nowhere in sight, but Meris gives him a spectacularly dirty look over the top of her book before she goes right back to reading it, as if he’s not standing there at all.

He slams that one shut, and successfully opens the door across the hall, too, because no one has any good sense to lock their doors, not even when Nic went missing from this one.

Percy, evidently, was just about to walk out. He raises a hand, as if about to give a firm smacking to whoever nearly walked into him, notices who he’s about to hit, and quickly retracts it. He disappears into the hall.

Mal rolls his head off the back of the couch to look him in the eye and Arwen does the same, perched awkwardly on the last few inches of the armrest.

“Is he not in here?” he asks, surprised at how steady his voice is. He doesn’t even feel that steady.

“Who?”

Soran sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose as hard as he physically can, but the pain doesn’t do much. “Icarus,” he forces out eventually, struggling to maintain it.

“What about Icarus?” Emmi asks, emerging from the hall. She’s either doing a spectacular or terrible job wrapping the towel around her damp hair - he can’t really tell. “Is Percy gone already? I was going to go with him.”

“Fuck Percy for a second,” he snaps, which isn’t fair. Percy’s going through it just about as much as he is, currently. “Is he not here?”

“Why would Icarus be here?”

He sighs again, but this one is infinitely more loud. If only anyone in here was actually looking even a smidgen concerned. Mal looks amused. Emmi looks confused. Arwen’s not looking at him at all - she stretches out her arm to adjust the edge of the towel on Emmi’s head as if that’s her only priority in life.

Soran can’t get that lucky.

“He fucking took it again.”

Mal snorts, not even trying to muffle the noise, and then goes right back to the television like he’s not even there.

He really is invisible these days.

“God, he really did it _again_?” Arwen cackles. “I love this guy and I’ve never even properly met him.”

“Have you tried calling him?” Emmi asks, leaning against the couch. It feels a lot like it’s three versus one right now. If only Jupiter was around. They’re too nice not to be on the side of the currently outnumbered.

“Obviously.”

“Threatening his life doesn’t count as a phone call,” Mal mutters. Emmi reaches for the nearest throw pillow and whacks him in the side of the head with it.

But then, Emmi wiggles her own phone out of her pocket, and he feels trepidation fill his gut when she presumably dials his number, bringing it up to her ear.

He picks up so quickly, judging by the slight change in Emmi’s face, that Soran was getting ignored all along.

“Hey,” Emmi starts, almost nervously. He strides across the room towards her and Arwen picks up the abandoned pillow, hitting him in the chest with it before he even gets there. Emmi wedges the phone against her shoulder and holds out her hand, immediately shoving him in the chest as well to give herself some room the second the pillow is gone.

“Yeah, hey— no, where are you right now?” Emmi asks. The temptation to rip the phone out of her hand is stronger than almost anything he’s ever felt.

Icarus already ignored him once. If Soran tries to talk to him now, the same thing is going to happen.

“No reason,” Emmi says quickly. “Are you… coming back anytime soon?”

Soran only wishes he could hear it. That would make everything a million times better. Anything, even a response, would stop the rolling in his stomach.

“Okay,” Emmi says. She catches her lower lip in-between her teeth. Something, almost indistinguishable, changes in her face. She does a neat side-step away from him once again all the way to the fridge, and rips the lone paper there away from it’s magnet. When she pitches it towards the garbage can he can’t help but watch it go - the crumpled ball lands a mile away and rolls for the window, but not before Arwen dives off the couch to scoop it up. She shoves it into her pocket and offers him the most insincere grin he thinks he may have ever seen.

He doesn’t even want to know.

“He’s coming back,” Emmi says. It takes him a moment to realize she’s addressing him. “Okay. How long do you think?”

She nods. Listens deeply to whatever Icarus must be telling her. That look on her face never goes away. He doesn’t look behind him, but he thinks he can hear Arwen straightening out the crumpled paper.

Before he can process it, Emmi hangs up. He stares blankly at her phone as she hides it away once again.

“He’s bringing it back,” she tells him, fitting her face now with an overly cheerful smile. Maybe it really is that cheerful. It’s hard to tell with her. “He’ll be back in a few hours.”

Soran blinks. “Are you fucking serious?”

“He also said ‘tell him not to kill me the second I get back’.”

“He won’t even make it upstairs,” he says under his breath, turning back for the door. No one even bothered closing it. Something in him is bothered, for that, but he has bigger things to worry about.

“I wouldn’t,” Emmi says after him.

“I’m going to.”

“You’ll regret it!” she shouts. He slams the door behind him and cuts off whatever she was about to say after it, if anything at all.

He doesn’t think he will.

—

Soran thought a _few hours_ was intended as a joke.

In a twist of fate, it wasn’t.

He could go out. He could _find him._ If Soran really wanted to, he could. There’s only so many places in this city you could run to, and he’s on foot. Soran could find him quicker than anyone could expect.

Except he doesn’t. He sits down at the very edge of the couch and doesn’t move, for nearly three hours.

It’s a long, terrible three hours. The television never even gets turned on. If his leg isn’t moving it’s his hands, or his nails in his mouth, and they’re ripped to shreds by the time he hears footsteps outside the door, the skin around them raw.

It all takes so long he can’t help but wonder about the truth of it all. It feels like he went to sleep and got transported back a few weeks, to the awful beginning of all of this, when nothing made sense and he just wanted to be behind a closed door again, alone.

He’s sitting on the couch, alone, realizing he doesn’t want to be. It’s a terrible realization to have, when you are in fact alone.

But then, the footsteps. It could be someone from across the hall, curious about what’s transpired, if anything has.

There’s hesitance, though. Soran hears it, or rather hears the lack of it. The footsteps pause, and everything goes silent. He can’t even hear his own heart anymore, and it’s been the loudest thing around him for the past three hours. When it’s the only thing making noise, it’s hard to focus on anything else.

No one else would hesitate. Meris doesn’t care. Mel would just open the door and ask, same with anyone else across the hall. Percy wouldn’t even bother, because no one is going to tell him.

There’s no one else it could be.

Soran doesn’t recall a conscious decision to get to his feet - his legs are weaker than he’d like them to be, and practically numb from sitting for so long. Without realizing it he’s around the couch and five feet from the door, and then four, and then three.

He’s a hypocrite. He didn’t even lock it.

Neither did Icarus when he left, though.

When Icarus opens the door he’s clearly alarmed by the sudden proximity. His eyes widen. His mouth forms around a word that doesn’t end up coming out. He sees Soran, there, and everything else stops.

Soran grabs him, and it really is like weeks ago. Tight around the wrist, so hard that he knows he can feel it and the fragility of his own bones.

There’s only the briefest flash of panic, and then it melts away. He doesn’t try to pull back.

Icarus looks… unreadable, when he’s usually the most open book in the room, emotions read like words on a page.

“Hey,” he says quietly, almost gently. Slowly, he reaches down to the floor to drop the bag in his other hand, something Soran hadn’t even noticed, and then his fingers close overtop of Soran’s own, still with a death-grip on his wrist.

“I’m going to—”

“Not kill me,” Icarus interrupts. “I’m sorry.”

The sincerity of it is overwhelming. He’s only heard that amount once before, and it was when he was dying.

So what’s happening now, exactly, if no one is?

Maybe this is dying anyway, worse than any other way to have it happen. More painful, drawn out longer, doomed to end anyway. It’s as if he hasn’t already tried to die enough already and life is starting over with him.

This almost seemed like a point to start over. Or at least it had.

“Just hear me out, alright?” Icarus asks. “You can kill me after, if you want. It was probably a stupid idea anyway.”

Everything seems like a stupid idea with them, he wants to say.

Icarus doesn’t force him to let go, or even ask, but squeezes his hand instead, offering a small smile. He lets his fingers slip away.

“Before you freak out, I just want you to know this is reversible,” Icarus starts. “They can, uh, get it out. If you want them to.”

He has a lot of questions queued up, most of them contain many variations of the word _what_ , but Soran can manage to do little more than stare at him and wait for whatever’s coming next. He scoops up the bag off the floor - it’s nondescript, could be from anywhere. But like he said, as of today he really doesn’t want to know anymore. That goes for most things.

“Stupid idea, I know,” Icarus says again, as if Soran even knows what it is. “But I’d ideally like if you stopped risking losing it, and it’ll be a lot harder this way.”

“Are you ever gonna get to the point?” he asks.

“Patience,” Icarus insists. A bold word coming out of the mouth of someone who has very little. “And I hope you know, this isn’t anywhere near a proposal.”

Soran has little idea what that’s even supposed to mean until Icarus finally stops rummaging around in the bag, hand emerging with a box the size of his palm, about an inch tall. Then, he has all the knowledge in the world.

He blinks. “That’s sort of what it looks like.”

“Please. You couldn’t get that lucky yet.”

Icarus is holding his hand out, an offer. He’s dropped the bag on the floor again, leaving the two of them and the box and the sinking, suspicious feeling in his stomach that’s rapidly trying to dissolve away. It knows the truth better than his traitorous brain does.

“It’s not going to bite you,” Icarus says.

“It might.”

Icarus sighs, grabs him by the arm, and all but shoves the box into his hand, closing his other over-top of it. The first urge in him is to throw it out the window.

Is that the best option? It might be.

He keeps his head down when he cracks the box open. He knows nothing about his face is immediately visible, least of all his emotions, but it’s still a struggle to keep his face blank.

He’s never even thought of it in such a way. It was always an object, something he had to keep track of, a struggle to watch and maintain. There was no way to watch it forever; he had to close his eyes, sometimes. That part of him was still human.

The stone is still the exact same. He knows it as if it's a part of him, the size and shape and feel of it, and it still looks unchanged now despite being nestled in the center of a ring. It’s golden, color sharp against the shimmering white of the stone. It doesn’t even look new. There’s something off about it, something old in the ornate curl and faded gold around the edges.

It’s still an object, but this one is different.

He swallows, just to make sure his voice is steady. “They can get it out?”

“I made sure, yeah,” Icarus says quietly. He doesn’t even sound _disappointed_. If he went through the trouble to make sure they could, he knew this was coming. Soran could probably get it out himself, is the thing. The stone doesn’t budge when he runs his finger over it, but all he would have to do is pull the prongs back and pop it out.

“If you’re going to kill me, I’d appreciate some warning,” Icarus says. He could do that.

Soran could do a lot of things.

He takes the ring out, none too gently, and shoves it onto his finger in much the same manner. Of course it fits. He shouldn’t have expected otherwise.

He allows himself to look up, finally. “I don’t think you deserve a warning,” he says, and then kisses him with just as little.

Whatever was written all over Icarus’ face is gone just as quickly.

The first one was nothing. It was like mist, so intangible that it could have been a distant memory. It could have never happened at all.

It’s definitely happening now.

 _And,_ now, Soran knows for sure that this one is nothing like the first.

He's not surprised. He gets why, in the situation he's been given. He still has anger, somewhere faint in the pit of his stomach, stress and anxiety and the beginnings of a headache deep in his skull. There's something else though too, an unfortunate desperation in the shake of his fingers still tangled in Icarus's shirt, the sudden proximity of him that blocks out anything else, like the sun's blotted out the moon.

He knows that Icarus must feel something similar, as if their veins are both being flooded with it, because when Soran begins to pull away Icarus reaches forward to drag him back in with two hands round the back of his neck, catching him before he can go elsewhere. Something is _right_ when he has him back, when they're kissing again, something that never made sense before as much as he tried to understand it. He can feel the ring pressed in tight against the edge of his fingers where he has them clenched, but it fits better than anything ever could.

It's been too long.

He can't recall anything real or tangible in the last several hundred years, nothing good enough to be anything but fleeting before he was lost once again. Nothing _real._

But this - this is real, and he’s not going to—

Icarus is the one that pulls away, this time, and he has no choice in the matter. He was going to say _let go of it_ but Icarus locks a hand around his forearm, giving him little leverage to pull him back anywhere close enough. His eyes are closed, and he’s stock still besides that, like a statue. When he opens them he just _stares_ , on and on and on, and he feels like he’s losing a part of himself. The sensible one, wherever it lives, the one that understands how bad of an idea all of this is - it’s all going away the longer Icarus looks at him.

He doesn’t want to let go this time, not like he did in the middle of the night.

He never wanted to then, either.

“So,” Icarus says slowly, words chosen carefully as if each one is a possible match. “Does that mean you like it?”

Soran gives him a dirty look. “If you take it again—”

“Well, it’s attached to you now. That was sort of the point.”

He’s successfully broken some of the tension, but Soran’s still not doing anything. He can’t manage to, other than just simply stand there. He’s not trying to get away, or even shoving Icarus off. Anything would be better than nothing, but he’s almost starting to like nothing better.

They’re both fucked, is what this is. Both entirely unaware of what’s going on or what they’re doing save for the fact that it was something mutual, at least. He wasn’t lying when he thought it - it’s been too fucking long. He has no idea, now.

He just knows the longer he gets stared at the worse it gets. He’s losing more of himself that he’s never going to get back.

And maybe he doesn’t want it back, either.

“Stop staring at me,” Soran tries.

“No.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause I was thinking about kissing you again, but—”

“But what?”

Icarus was scared to, maybe. Icarus hasn’t been scared of that much recently, getting better with every passing day. It all comes down to the fact that Soran could get away from him too easily, if he wanted to. And yet he’s not.

So what did Icarus think, exactly?

“You’re fucking ridiculous,” he mutters, and kisses him again. Icarus doesn’t go anywhere this time.

In fact, neither of them go anywhere after that, for a long while.

—

It’s never been like this before.

Soran doesn’t even have anything good to compare it to.

It’s the shit you see in movies, shows, about other people but never about himself. Soran was not meant to have this.

But here it is. Him sitting on one end of the couch, minding his own business, and Icarus on the other, occasionally jabbing his cold ass foot into Soran’s thigh without saying a word. Some people, clearly, just aren’t meant to mind their business.

But it’s not bad. It’s starting to get dark. Everything is okay?

It might be. Maybe Mel really was right.

Icarus hasn’t been at it for a while, though. Soran’s seen notifications going off from his phone even though it’s a safe distance away on the table, so it’s not hard to guess why. His curiosity isn’t usually so insatiable. He’s the type of person that _can_ mind their business and not second guess it. He’s had hundreds and hundreds of years to practice.

He hasn’t seen him type anything out, in a while, and he watches just to confirm only for Icarus to look up at him. Apparently he was watching for too long.

“Has the harassment about why you haven’t fled to someone else’s apartment started yet?” he asks. It’s going to be a topic of conversation eventually, if it isn’t already.

“Sort of,” Icarus hums. “What should I say?”

Soran finally gives in and scoops his phone off the table, silencing all of the incessant messages flooding in. The conversation has stretched on for some time, but he scrolls all the way to the bottom, to the messages that are still coming in.

 **jaybird:** so when are you leaving?

 **jaybird:** you can't just keep freeloading forever

 **Sabre** : Says you.

 **jaybird** : HE SPEAKS

 **jaybird** : ❤

 **icarus** : im not freeloading

 **jaybird** : yes you are

“You’re absolutely freeloading,” Soran says. Icarus drives his foot back into his leg, and his toes are colder than ever before.

_jaybird changed icarus's nickname to freeloader_

_Sabre changed jaybird's nickname to Bigger Freeloader_

**Bigger Freeloader** : SABRE 

**emmi** : Betrayal

 **Godly landlady** : Icarus you need to demand a bed to sleep in if you're staying

 **Bigger Freeloader** : sleeping on a couch is going to permafuck your back you know

 **Bigger Freeloader** : (oh wait)

 **emmi** : o u c h

 **emmi** : @soran buy him a bed

“Don’t say anything,” Soran instructs. Mostly because he doesn’t need him to, and half because he’s already watching Icarus type something out anyway.

He shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t.

Another notification pops up. _Freeloader changed Bigger Freeloader's nickname to Asshole Freeloader._ Well, at least he didn’t actually say anything. And it’s not as if Jay doesn’t deserve it, anyhow, and according to his immediate response apparently he agrees.

Maybe it’s because Soran no longer, or maybe it’s because he cares and it’s getting to the point of it being just a tad too much.

Icarus is looking at him, waiting. It was all going to boil over eventually.

 **soran** : he has a bed to sleep in

 **emmi** : what

 **Godly landlady** : what

 **Asshole Freeloader** : WHAT

 **emmi** : im so fucking mad right now

 **Sabre** : 👍

 **emmi** : @winnie babe i guess the money is going to the “it’s happening” pool huh

 **freeloader** : what the fuck

 **Godly landlady** : THERE WAS A BET?

 **winnie** : there sure was @mal i expect payment in the morning

 **mal** : I DON’T OWE YOU SHIT

 **winnie** : YES YOU DO

Soran watches that, processes the bit of information he just received, scrolls all the way down until he finds the option, and then promptly leaves the chat. Icarus is chuckling away as if it’s meant to be muffled, one hand pressed over his face. He’s keeping one eye on the phone, though, looking increasingly amused by the second.

A rough ten or so seconds later he makes an alarmed noise and practically flings himself off the couch. His phone goes flying - it connects with the center of Soran’s shin and then bounces back onto the cushion. He himself goes tumbling over the armrest and then nearly falls in his haste to get to the door. It’s already locked, but he slides the door chain into place as well.

Soran waits. He scoops up Icarus’ abandoned phone.

A key turns in the lock. He hears it, even though he’s not paying attention. Only one person in this building has all of the keys.

_soran has left the chat._

**Asshole Freeloader** : oh my fjdjsbs

 **trojan** : this is the worst news ever

 **planet jupiter** : aw no its not

 **planet jupiter** : you guys are cute

 **Asshole Freeloader** : idk about cute im actually terrified

 **trojan** : id rather world war 3

 **Godly landlady** : im coming upstairs

 **freeloader** : please don't

_Asshole Freeloader has changed the chat name to World War III: War Harder._

**Asshole Freeloader** : that silence means she's coming

 **Asshole Freeloader** : get ready

 **Asshole Freeloader** : also world war 2 was… something. hope this one’s better

 **trojan:** PLEASE STOP ACTING LIKE YOU WERE THERE

The door slams open, right on time, and is stopped by the chain. Soran flattens himself as far as he can get into the cushions even as Myra’s voice rings throughout the entire apartment.

“You _motherfucker_ ,” she emphasizes. Soran can only envision the staring match that’s going on through the crack in the door, though judging by Icarus’ continuous laugh he’s losing by a long mile.

“Soran, I know you’re over there!” she yells. “I’m going to kill you.”

He raises his middle finger over the back of the couch. Icarus’ laughing only increases in volume. He’s not entirely sure what happens, as there’s no way Myra would concede to losing this fight, especially not to _Icarus_ , but the door slams shut and shakes. Icarus, almost instantly, comes rolling over the back of the couch and lands half on top of him, nothing apologetic in his eyes at all.

What little of them Soran can see, anyway. He’s so close that he can’t see much.

It’s an effort poorly disguised as him looking for his phone back, only he doesn’t reach for it all. He lets Soran hold it above them both as he skims through the conversation that has come through since he left, a garbled mess of exclamations and words that hardly make any sense at all.

And Icarus still isn’t making any effort to move. His elbows are poking everywhere they shouldn’t be. One is digging right into Soran’s chest as he reaches up a lone finger to scroll further down the chat, searching for something.

Soran doesn’t ask what.

“God, Trojan is definitely going to kill me now that he knows I’m staying,” Icarus mutters. Soran doesn’t even want to know what he’s saying to provoke such a thought, so he keeps his eyes on the ceiling.

“Why?”

“He just is.”

“He won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that, because now he knows I’ll kill him, too.”

Icarus almost looks appropriately touched for a moment until it fades away. “You can’t supervise me all day and all night.”

“I don’t think anyone could,” he says under his breath, but Icarus is too close to miss it. An elbow digs into him again. He doesn’t think it’s an accident this time.

“Seriously, when you were out, the second he got me alone I thought he was going to start ripping limbs off. And he probably would have if Emmi hadn’t shown up.”

“He won’t.”

“You don’t—”

“Trust me,” he insists. “Trojan won’t do anything.” Not if Soran gets to him first, anyhow, and he will. Trojan has as much of a life here as any of them do - he won’t risk that just to get a bit of enjoyment out of his daily ongoings.

Besides, he’s usually a ripper on people he _doesn’t_ know. Until he proves he’s capable otherwise, Soran’s not that worried, and he won’t be until Icarus ever makes an active move away from him. How could Trojan do _anything_ to him when he’s always so close?

Icarus drops his hand, clearly done with the phone. Soran is still getting accustomed to the feeling of a ring pressed into his skin.

“You okay?” Icarus asks. He props his chin up on Soran’s shoulder, still very close.

He nods. It’s about as believable as anything can be with him these days.

Without a word Icarus eases off of him, careful not to poke or prod anymore than he already has. He takes his phone with him, too, flopping back down onto his side of the couch.

Not smothering. Not yet.

He does slide his leg back though, stretching out as far as he can. Further than he needs to, even. It was something he could anticipate with ease. This time it stays, though, leaning against his for so long that he almost stops feeling it altogether. Like it’s familiar.

And it’s quiet, and it’s good.

Right now he’s in the mindset that that’s all the two of them need.

—

Allowing yourself to get used to something is dangerous.

That’s exactly what Soran is doing almost immediately.

When you’re weighing the good and the bad and most of what you’ve had is bad, clinging to the good is almost pure instinct. It’s reverting back to the inborn feelings inside of him, the ones he had been ignoring for so long. People, human or not, needed certain things. He had come to the conclusion that he was not one of those normal people and that he could go without.

And it didn’t matter, turns out, because those not-normal people usually turn out to be wrong anyway.

It’s not quite as bright in the morning as it has been; everything is reverting back to its normal state, even the weather. The clouds may come and go as they please. He doesn’t need them right now.

Predictably, though, Icarus is still asleep. He was correct on his assumption that he doesn’t seem like the type of normal person to fit the bill of ‘early riser’ and he doesn’t think that will change.

Soran used to be the same, getting up early every morning so long as he had a purpose. That had lessened, in recent years.

Maybe it was coming back.

Not that there’s anything to do except wait for the inevitability of someone coming to harass him, but most others in this place wouldn’t come crawling out so early either. They won’t gain anything from harassing him. Most people need the gain to be motivated, to get something. Soran just happened to do his backwards. He’s already got something out of it, when he hasn’t really done anything.

Unless you count bringing Icarus back to life. Icarus probably counts that.

It’s good enough, and they could leave it at that. Icarus won’t start prodding for a while longer. One day his curiosity will grow again, and so will the questions.

Or Soran could just tell him. That’s why he’s steeled for the conversation when he hears Icarus wake without looking over, sometime later. There’s no rehearsing it in his head. Everyone in here did the majority of the research on their own and spread it around like wildfire the second he gave up one little detail.

Icarus has turned out to be different than that.

“You awake over there?” he asks, just for confirmation.

“Mhm.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Sure,” Icarus supplies, rolling over towards him, nearly into his side. His eyes aren’t even open. That almost makes it easier. There’s less pressure attached to it that way.

Soran knocks his hand into Icarus’ chest for a moment, just long enough that he must be able to feel the ring. “This,” he starts. “Is called a yeouiju. If I ever hear you repeat that, I may beat you up. I have no desire to hear you butcher a language you don’t know.”

“Got it.”

“This is not something we’re born with,” he continues. “For the first stage of our lives - the first thousand years - we’re considered lesser. And until you get a hold of one, that’s how you are. You’re essentially nothing. You have little power, little control over everything. Just the wings and hardly anything else.”

“Hold on,” Icarus interrupts. He looks very awake now. “Wings?”

“I’m getting there.”

“You can’t just say that word to _me_ of all people and expect nothing in return.”

“I’m getting there,” he repeats, resisting the urge to flatten his hand over Icarus’ mouth. “When you get one of these, everything changes. You can do whatever you want - within reason. Heal sickness, produce something out of thin air—”

“Bringing someone back to life,” Icarus murmurs.

“Apparently. I admittedly wasn’t sure about that one. Probably shouldn’t consider what it did to me.”

Icarus nods, almost thoughtfully. He was the one that saw the aftermath of it the most. He knows that better than anyone.

“But you said _wings_ ,” Icarus insists, eyes bewildered. It feels as if he’s trying to shove an arm under them both, as if physically checking is going to help.

It’s not.

Soran sits up with a sigh, already struggling with his shirt. He can’t even blame his clumsy hands on the fog of sleep - he’s been awake for too long. Maybe the admittance is making his hands refusal to work all the more obvious. 

“You know,” he manages. “First you’re insistent that you’re not proposing, and now it feels a lot like you’re just trying to get my clothes off.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Yours,” he clarifies, but finishes with the process regardless and tosses his shirt somewhere, lost for the time being. It really doesn’t matter what happens next, because all of it is going away with the admission. He’s covered in scars. Icarus is going to see. He’s going to see anyway, sometime in the future, if not today.

None of it matters.

He turns around to look at Icarus before he can get a word out otherwise. “We have them our whole lives, but you know better than anyone. They’re annoyingly present. They’re cumbersome. And unlike you, people have wanted me dead for them. For existing, for holding onto this damn stone. People have been trying to kill me for as long as they could find me. So the first thing I did when I got a hold of it was wish for an easier existence. To be able to blend in like a normal person would.”

“Well, you look pretty normal to me,” Icarus says quietly. If you ignore the scars and the numerous murderous attempts, most of which haven’t even been self-inflicted. “So I just… can’t see them?”

“You can’t see them because right now, I don’t need them. But when I do, it’s as easy as breathing. If I want them, they’re there.”

“Right.”

He’s not going to ask. Icarus has been asking for so long, and right now he’s not willing to. Soran has the choice to himself, for the first time in a long time.

It’s too bad he already made the decision the second he woke up.

In fact, it’s even easier than breathing. Soran doesn’t even have to think about it. It’s as if they live inside him now, two creatures that emerge only in the infrequent times they need to. He’s tried to watch the process before, as they form and grow. It’s almost never successful. Nine times out of ten a bathroom mirror isn’t even big enough to contain it.

The bed dips under Icarus’ weight as he sits up, painfully slow. Soran can see the tip of each wing in his peripherals - Icarus is getting a full, unblocked view. He feels him reach a hand out. Nothing connects. He must retract it as quickly as he offers it.

“When you said _wings_ ,” Icarus croaks. “I was picturing, like…”

“A bird?”

“Yeah.”

“You can say the word dragon.”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Icarus. “I wasn’t even— I was going to say lizard.”

“Since when do lizards have wings?”

“I don’t know!” Icarus says wildly. “Jesus fucking Christ. Are you telling me you can breathe fire?”

“That is not at all what I’m telling you.”

“You said—”

“You’re thinking European dragons, first of all, and they’re awful and nasty as hell. Second, you watched it rain for about two straight weeks and _fire_ is your first thought?” Soran shifts away in the quest for his shirt, not that he’s going to be able to get back into it right now, and Icarus doesn’t try to stop him. He’s likely too stunned. When Soran chances a glance at him, his eyes are somewhere else.

“God,” Icarus says finally. “Water?”

“Pretty much.”

“Fuck,” he mutters, rubbing at both temples. “This is insane.”

“You’re telling me,” he replies. He’s had to get off the bed, now. His shirt ended up on the floor. Luckily it doesn’t take him long to get back into it. “I’m going to eat now. You’re welcome to come. You’re also welcome to sit here all day if you want.”

“You’re incredible, you know that?” Icarus asks. Soran pauses, halfway to the door. Icarus doesn’t look sure about anything, save for the words that just came out of his mouth.

“I’m not.”

“Yeah,” he says softly. “You are.”

It’s painfully, almost awkwardly genuine. He wonders if throwing himself off the fire escape sans wings is an option.

It takes him a moment to roll his eyes, to step out into the hall. He thinks he’s calmed down, and he’d like to pretend that, but his heart is telling him otherwise. Icarus will follow quickly. He already is, at least with his eyes.

And he’s not incredible, really, but something about this is.

—

He could lay there the next morning, too, but Soran has better plans.

Who knows if they’ll be bigger, though.

It always seems to be bigger than Trojan, bigger than anything has any right to be. With him it’s an explosion and everyone else is left to deal with the fallout while he retreats into whatever hellish hole he crawled out of in the first place.

He just couldn’t fathom someone with only twenty-one years under them being so annoying. He supposes that comes with being an occasionally rage-induced monster.

Truth be told, he doesn’t even expect Trojan to be up, let alone to get a quick and communicative answer out of him. Soran slams his fist against the door twice, and is preparing himself for a third when the door opens and he nearly punches Trojan in the face instead.

It wouldn't be the first time it’s happened, or even the second.

“Can I help you?” Trojan asks, evidently annoyed. Kidava’s behind him, standing at the entrance to the hall, arms crossed over her chest. She straightens at the sight of him, the perfect standing example of a bodyguard with nothing to protect.

He’s surprised to see Trojan just shy of nine in the morning, even, but for her to just be here, lingering about, when she should be asleep upstairs?

It doesn’t make any sense.

“What the hell are you two doing?” Soran asks.

“None of your fucking business,” Trojan snaps. “What do you want?”

To say he’s lost his train of thought is an understatement. Trojan is one thing, and Kidava is another, and together they’re both the incident and the fallout combined.

Together, they’re even worse.

Trojan’s gotten defensive, too. The lines of his shoulders are tense, and he looks about ready to trap Soran’s elbow in the door when he slams it. Kidava’s back is still ramrod straight, like a ruler, and her fists are clenched around the sleeves of her shirt.

Something’s not right, here.

“Any day now,” Trojan quips, already sounded more infuriated. He’s not going to figure it out now, apparently. His time is running out.

“You know he’s staying,” Soran says. There’s no other room discussion.

“Right, because you two are apparently in love or some shit. Congratulations. Couldn’t care less. Can you leave, now?”

“You’re going to stay away from him,” Soran tells him. Trojan’s eyebrows crease - his already permanently angry features look even angrier. “I’m serious.”

“And I’m _serious,”_ Trojan fires back. “What do I get out of it?”

“Your life.”

“Ha,” he says flatly. “Great.”

“I’m serious,” Soran repeats. “All you have to do is stay away from him.”

“Try telling him to stay away from _me_ then. He’s only gonna end up dead if he gets too close.”

“Some people already have!” Kidava chirps happily. She sounds far too overjoyed at the prospect of it, the image of it in her head. There is something seriously wrong with her, he suspects. No, he _knows._ He knew it five minutes after he had the misfortune to meet her.

Trojan, on the other hand, turns a look on her so malicious that Soran is surprised to see her not melt into a puddle of goo all over his living room floor. Anyone else would have.

Another thing he’s learned - Kidava is not just anyone.

“Good fucking talk,” Trojan practically grows. He’s still not even looking his way. Soran expects it when Trojan slams the door in his face, and he throws his hand back up to stop it from connecting.

It almost closes. The lock almost clicks back into place, but its momentum stops as Soran’s hand halts its progress. It _sounded_ like it closed at least, but if he dared to push it open again it would ease back in, and Trojan would have to try again.

He didn’t even mean to, really. Something in him stopped the door from closing, and Trojan is already stomping away from it.

_Be careful._

They haven’t told him to be careful, or anything of the sort, in so long that it’s startling. The spirits stopped telling him when they realized they weren’t getting anywhere. To hear it now means something really is wrong, just as he initially suspected.

They’re talking, but he can’t hear them, and Kidava’s voice is fading off. She’s headed down the hall. He waits until Trojan’s voice does much the same and cracks the door open, just enough to peek in. There’s no sudden yelling or outrage, so it’s as safe as it’s going to get.

Kidava is gone, now, and the bathroom light is spilling out into the hall. He can see her shadow on the ground, but nothing of her. Trojan is standing in the doorway, rubbing at his temples. Whatever he says, Soran can’t tell, and he’s not good enough to read lips.

After a moment he too steps into the bathroom. The door clicks shut behind them both.

_Go back upstairs._

They know him better than he knows himself most days. He wants to go in. He wants to go after them. If they weren’t in his head talking to him, he probably would.

_It’s not just you anymore._

“I get it,” he says under his breath, and eases the door shut. Whatever it is, he wasn’t meant to see, and they clearly don’t want him in there.

And he did come down here for Icarus.

It only makes sense that he goes back because of him too, intact. That doesn’t mean he’s going to stop thinking about it.

It doesn’t help that Icarus is actually awake when he returns, though his eyes are half-lidded and he’s wrapped himself in a blanket so tight he looks like a human burrito, indenting the chair he’s already dented even further.

Icarus’ eyes follow him into the kitchen. He may pull the fridge open too hard and slam it shut too viciously for it to be anything but noticeable.

“I was wondering where you went,” Icarus offers. It’s not a question. Soran expected to get one.

He still gives up the answer. “Trojan’s.”

“Oh,” Icarus says. “He’s definitely going to kill me now, isn’t he?”

“No.”

“He might.”

“If he tries, I’ll break his fucking neck.” It comes out as more of a promise than he intended it to. It’s not anger about that which gets to him in that moment. He doesn’t think Trojan will.

Soran doesn’t like not knowing things. And he especially doesn’t like not knowing things that need to be known.

They wouldn’t have kept him away otherwise.

“You okay?” Icarus asks. When Soran turns around to him he looks infinitely more awake, chin propped up on his knee.

“Yeah.”

“You can tell me if you’re not.”

Soran nods. He didn’t even take anything out of the fridge - there’s nothing to focus on, unless he wants to stare at his own feet. There’s not much better to look at.

This isn’t how a two-way street operates, but to be fair he’s not even in the mood to move down it at all right now. He’s too used to operating on his own to jump into things so quickly with someone else; frankly, it’s a miracle he came back up here so easily at all. It’s all just going to take some getting used to.

He’s still staring at nothing when Icarus touches his arm. “You sure?”

“Hundred percent.”

For once it’s not about his own state of mind. It’s a relief to have a break for once, to not have to worry that his own brain is turning against him. Something is wrong, and there’s no denying it. The fact that his head is silent is proving it more than anything else.

“Okay,” Icarus says slowly. This is a test to see if he believes him or not, and more-so to see if he’ll just let it go. “Well, Myra invited me to go with the cafe with her this morning. She said she’d feed me, so.”

He nods again. It’s all robotic motion. With him, sometimes it’s proven to be easier to go back to nothing but instincts.

“You can come, if you want.”

“I’m good. You go.”

Icarus doesn’t want to leave him here. When Soran looks up, he can see it. Like he said - it’s all a test.

Soran doesn’t leave him any time for arguments. He scoops his wallet off the counter and shoves it at him. “Take this with you, too. Make Myra drive you somewhere where you can buy yourself a wardrobe instead of stealing most of mine.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously,” he confirms. “Go. I’m fine.”

Icarus takes the wallet with a little smile. He’s going to go. Maybe not every single part of him wants to, but that’s the best outcome that both of them could hope for in this situation. Icarus needs to go and start acting like a normal person, possibly for the first time ever. Soran just needs some time alone. He always will.

The emptiness is usually good for him, but once Icarus leaves it allows his head to run rampant, and not much will shut it off.

Nothing, in fact.

He knew it was going to be some time, but still, being alone for hours does nothing in the grand scheme of things to quell the various suspicions swimming about in his mind. In fact, they only end up making things worse. It’s one thing to harbor worries, and another to think they’re actually going to turn into something.

He’d say he’s being paranoid, but it’s _Trojan._ Something always comes of it being Trojan.

He can’t think about it forever, though, especially if no answer presents itself. The chat seems like enough of a distraction for a while, though it requires him to rejoin, to little fanfare. It seems that most people halfway through the day aren’t particularly inclined to jump for joy through the internet.

Hardly anyone is even present, really.

That’s the reason it ends up being so noticeable.

There’s hardly any green lights indicating activity all along the list of people stuck in this hellish form of a chat. Three or four, maybe, none of which are paying any active sort of attention.

And then a fifth, out of nowhere. It blinks up and disappears just as fast as it appeared.

For a heartbeat, perhaps, there was activity next to Nic’s name.

It wouldn’t be the first time in recent history that he couldn’t trust what his eyes were seeing; apparently he was more kene on hallucinations than he had thought. That’s what it continues to feel like for a few stilted minutes, his breath held so awkwardly that his chest begins to hurt in all the wrong places.

As if there were good ones to begin with.

Nothing shifts or changes despite how long he stares at it, keeping his finger pressed to the screen bright as can be. It just moves along as if it’s anyone - active three minutes ago, and then four, five, six.

At seven, the door opens behind him. He whirls, ready to shove the couch so deep into the bowels of the couch that it’s lost forever, but Icarus is alone upon his return, struggling through the doorway. He’s waving Soran’s wallet in one hand because the other arm is too preoccupied and laden with bags.

“I swear I didn’t max out your credit card,” is the first thing he says. “Swear.”

How he sounds out of breath from carrying bags a few feet down the hall, presumably after exiting the elevator because Soran wasn’t there to make him walk up, is beyond him. He’s not even going to ask.

If Myra was still with him, or anyone for that matter, he would have hid it.

He returns to staring at it, instead, and the thunk of Icarus dropping all of the bigs in the middle of the front entryway is a very obvious one. Soran feels him lean over the back of the couch, but can’t brace himself nearly enough for the both of them.

“What did you do all day?” Icarus asks, looking over Soran’s shoulder. “What is…”

The trail off is _painful_ but Soran can’t even begin to explain what he’s looking at. Even if he could, he doesn’t think it would help. Icarus has gone slightly slack-jawed, throat working away like swallowing half a dozen times if going to produce the words he needs.

“I saw it when it was active. It was just a few seconds.”

“That’s— that’s not right, or something. Percy just has his phone, doesn’t he?” Icarus asks. “He just… went on it for a second.”

“The police have his phone,” he corrects. “Or at least they did. They took it in for evidence, went through it in the first two days, and they never gave it back. Who knows where it is now.”

“So a computer, then,” Icarus offers. “He was logged in on someone’s computer in the apartment, and—”

“It’s been _three months_ ,” he insists. “Why would anyone still have it up?”

“I’m just trying to find an explanation that doesn’t line up with him still being out there, somewhere, on social media like that’s perfectly _normal_ ,” Icarus says. “That’s not normal.”

And nothing is around here. The simple things don’t exist in what they call lives. It’s always something, always complicated. You never escape from it. That’s what you accept when you move in here. That’s the risk Nic took when he decided to call it home.

“Someone’s fucking with us,” Icarus says. He shakes his head.

People don’t have to die. Sometimes they just _go._ All it would take is a few carefully placed items and enough of a suspicious crime scene to convince everyone he was dead, and then maybe once some time had passed everyone would stop looking. They weren’t to that point - they wouldn’t be, so long as Percy was heartily involved, but one day.

What if Nic just ran? Got scared, couldn’t bear to look Percy in the eye and tell him that?

He’s not that person, though. That’s what Soran is stuck on. Anyone else would run in this building before Nic did. They’re all the pinnacle of cowardice, of hiding from problems, and he was a human just trying to stick around and fix them.

Icarus is right, regardless of what all this means. Someone’s fucking with them.

He just doesn’t know if it’s Nic or not.

—

It comes as a surprise to exactly neither of them that sleep is a difficult thing to chase that night.

Icarus has been tossing and turning for over an hour, now, while Soran remains as still as possible, all the while hoping that if he keeps his eyes closed something good will come of it.

Nothing does.

He can feel when Icarus is staring at him, and when he’s not. Judging by how still he’s been, Icarus probably thinks him asleep.

Oh, how he wishes.

He reaches back a blundering hand, just to give Icarus some indication that they’re suffering equally. Icarus hooks a finger around one of his own and lets go just as quick.

“Should we tell someone?” Icarus murmurs. “It’s eating at my brain.”

“It’s going to eat at everyone’s brain if we do.”

“I know, but…”

There is no but. He knows that, and Icarus realizes it. Without concrete evidence pointing to _anything,_ telling someone is only going to create panic that spreads and manifests like a disease. The last thing they need is for it to destroy everyone.

It’s silent for another few minutes until Icarus pokes at his back. “Can you talk?”

“About what?”

“Anything. It’s better than just sitting here.”

“What do you want to know?”

Icarus lies in quiet contemplation while he mulls the question over, no doubt filing through the dozens of questions stored around in his brain. He’s probably been waiting for this moment, when Soran’s too tired to run but not tired enough to answer them.

“I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this, but am I supposed to hear the voices?”

“Voices,” he echoes.

“Yeah. Ever since I got here. I only heard them properly when you were out.”

He sighs deeply. “Absolute traitors.”

“Who?”

“They’re spirits,” he clarifies. “Attached to the stone. You probably held onto it for so long that they latched onto you instead.”

“So it’s not… bad?”

“The opposite. Very good. So long as you can hear them they’ve got you.”

“And what about Yuri? She knows what you are?”

“She _is_ what I am. Way older, claims to be infinitely more wiser, will bully slash mother you into a grave because that’s the only way she’ll allow you to get there.”

It wasn’t an intentional find. Yuri was already safely established by the time he got here, and she just _knew_. So maybe she is wiser. She’s made the right decisions, got this far, and made her last wish however many years ago to live a mundane life.

He could say that, but he doesn’t. Yuri is going to age now, to a point, and then she’s going to die a very normal death the way she ought to. She’s decided she’s done. She’s going to go.

Soran could wish for the same thing, but he wasn’t. Something in him, time and time again, hesitates despite whatever method it could be delivered in.

He’s better at hesitating than anything else.

“One more thing,” Icarus says. “Why didn’t you just kill me?”

“What do you mean?”

“That first day. Any of them. You could have just gotten rid of me. I know you wanted to.”

“They told me not to,” he reveals. “You’re right. I wanted to. I thought it maybe a dozen times that first day alone. But they kept telling me not to.”

And now he knows why. He never could have imagined it back then, in a time that seems more like years ago than just a few short weeks.

It’s like he said - so long as you can hear them, they’ve got you.

Maybe they’re not traitors after all.

Soran rolls over onto his back, trading the window for the ceiling as his focal point. Icarus is carefully watching him, equally careful not to focus too much of his attention on any one spot. The admissions don’t weigh on him as much as he thought they would - perhaps they already were, and speaking them aloud was letting go of them.

He feels lighter, as if he’s gone back to the sky for good.

“Anything you wanna know?” Icarus asks. Apparently they’re not through with talking, yet. He’s not quite tired enough to let himself go.

Soran shrugs. “Pretend I asked you a question. Anything. And just tell me.”

“I’ve been thinking about that actually.” Icarus swallows. “I feel like you deserve something back, after everything you told me, but I just don’t know what’s good enough.”

“Anything.”

Icarus nods. Rolls over onto his back for the tenth time that night. Their shoulders are touching, this time. The quiet isn’t as thick as he would have expected; their breathing is almost in sync, as if the contact was all they needed.

“At the beginning I’d wake up and everything felt like it was wrong,” Icarus admits quietly. “I hardly knew where I was or _who_ I was or what was going to happen. And I still don’t. I’ve never lived to be this age. I’ve never made it past death. It’s all uncharted territory from here on out, and I couldn’t help but think that I was going to feel like that forever.”

He turns his head to the side, and Icarus does too a moment later. They’re closer than they normally are.

“I don’t feel like that as much anymore,” he murmurs. They really can do anything when it’s not entirely out in the open, as if the dark is so much safer.

For the two of them maybe it is.

Soran pulls his arm free from between them both and holds it out, leaving just enough room for Icarus to edge closer. He does so after only a moment’s hesitation, easing under Soran’s arm and up to his side, laying his head down on his shoulder. There’s no mistaking how close they are. Soran can’t remember the last time he had so little space.

“Go to sleep,” he tells him, letting his arm go to rest, just barely holding them together. The ring gleams over his shoulder in a sliver of moonlight.

“You too.”

“I will.” Once Icarus is asleep, once the weight of him has grown so heavy that he has no choice but to follow. No escape, no running. He’s here now, and he’s here to stay.

They both are.

—

He does indeed show him the sword in the morning.

Icarus flaps about like a kid in a candy store, a momentary gleeful distraction as he’s allowed to hold it for all of ten seconds before Soran takes it away from him. It’s still dangerous, sharp as can be, but it’s also _ancient._ One wrong move and he’s going to trash it, as unintentional as it would be.

At least now he knows of its existence, not that Soran would ever trust him to use it. It’s more the trusted knowledge, being able to trust someone else with a secret.

Besides, he’s not the only one in this building with a weapon they shouldn’t have. No one can rag on him for it.

Outside of the beginning, waving a practically prehistoric weapon around between the two of them, the morning is the easiest one they’ve had thus far. Everything just seems natural, as if they’re settling into a routine after only a few days of whatever this even is.

Soran knows what it is, but it’s a difficult thing to come to terms with. He knows it’s only a matter of time it shatters.

It just happens quicker than he expected to.

On top of that, it’s literal. He leaves for all of two minutes, down the stairs to open the mailbox with the prediction that he’ll be right back up.

It almost feels like the beginning of an earthquake, an event that lasts four or five seconds until the mailbox closes on its own from the tremors, until the door at the end of the hall begins to shake in frame and crack.

He gets his arm up in time for it to shatter, and the pieces rain down like daggers.

The pain is nothing compared to the odd, terrifying little dose of fear. It feels like an earthquake. It isn’t one. He knows the difference well enough. The whole building feels as if it’s going to be ripped from its foundation.

It stops, with no warning. He’s half to the ground, blood streaked across his arms and the sides of his face. He’s almost back up when it starts again, exactly the same as before. A few faint tremors that gradually pulsate stronger, as if something is flying overhead and getting a hair too close for comfort.

This time, though, he feels an _impact_ , an awful shudder and crash like something too-big has hit the ground right around them. There are people screaming in the street. A few go shooting through what little of the parking lot he can see and then out into the road, anywhere they can manage. He can also hear the stairwell door opening behind him just as the power overhead flickers out - he knows it’s Icarus by the chorus of nonsense swearing a second before he grabs him from behind, by the shoulders.

“What are you— Soran!”

What he was doing was crouching on the floor, hoping to avoid the worst of it, but that was when it was something that he had to stay away from.

This time, nothing’s told him to stay put. He wrenches himself away from Icarus’ hands before he can get a proper grip and practically tumbles out the shattered door, broken glass crunching underfoot.

There’s fire two or three blocks down the street, a great plume of smoke clouding the air. People are streaming around it, trying to get away. Another one, nearly identical, has landed itself smack dab between their building and the next one over. The other one took the worst of it - half the siding is scraped off and dangling, flames starting to lick at the interior. No wonder he saw people running.

There are sirens wailing, but they all sound so distant as he heads for it. The smoke is so thick he can’t see anything but it and the fire, but the deeper he heads the more it begins to thin, as if trying to free itself from whatever has caused it. The smoke, too, is trying to get away.

It’s bigger than he expected, taller than he is by at least a meter or two and wide enough that it nearly fills the alley. Besides that it’s practically indescribable, a steaming hunk of twisted metal and glass so thick it’s merely cracked, not broken.

He hears a few hoarse coughs before Icarus grabs his arm, again. Nothing in him is surprised.

“What the fuck is that?” he breathes. There’s no telling. Or maybe there is, and his brain won’t allow the confirmation.

Soran reaches a hand forward and Icarus snatches it back just as quick. “Don’t you dare touch it,” he snaps. “Is it— oh God, it’s moving.”

No, it’s not. The streaming shell of… whatever it even _is_ has yet to move at all. What’s really moving is something _inside_ of it, the contents lost in the haze.

The glass doesn’t crack, not like the door did. It seems to open up instead, as if controlled by magic, the seams splitting apart inch by inch to unfurl just wide enough to allow something through. For some reason, despite the movement, he expects nothing to happen, and a long second passes where nothing does.

He sees the hand, first. Nothing after that, because he can’t fixate on anything else.

It’s just a hand, but it looks so human.

Too human.

And just like he predicted, reality really does shatter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part two will be up sometime in May. See you then, and thanks for reading!


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